The Biden administration has just had a significant setback in its attempt to continue to impose its useless covid vaccine mandate.
A U.S. appeals court has just ruled the administration cannot require federal contractors to force their workers to be vaccinated against COVID-19 as a condition of government contracts.
The U.S. government has contracts with thousands of companies, and courts have said the issue could affect up to 20% of U.S. workers.A panel of the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals voted 2-1 to uphold a lower court decision that blocked President Joe Biden’s September 2021 contractor vaccine executive order in those states after Louisiana, Indiana, and Mississippi brought suit to seek invalidation of the mandate.The court said Biden wanted it “to ratify an exercise of proprietary authority that would permit him to unilaterally impose a healthcare decision on one-fifth of all employees in the United States. We decline to do so.”
Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry was pleased with the ruling, which supported the states’ view of Biden’s actions.
“We will continue to stand up against the Biden Administration’s abuses of power that threaten us now and in the future,” Landry said in a statement.The government had argued that the president had broad statutory authority to issue policies that “provide the Federal Government with an economical and efficient system” of contractor operations under the Procurement Act. The suing states said this interpretation of the law had no limiting principle.Biden’s administration countered that “presidential authority under the Procurement Act is constrained by the statute’s text, which requires that any executive order bear a close nexus to the statutory goals of establishing ‘an economical and efficient system’ for federal procurement and contracting.”The court agreed with the states that the government’s “closed nexus” test unlawfully gives the president “nearly unlimited authority” to impose requirements on federal contractors.
The majority opinion offered a very chilling example of what could happen if such mandates were allowed to proceed.
The majority opinion written by Judge Kurt Engelhardt said a broad interpretation of the law could give Biden “nearly unlimited authority to introduce requirements into federal contracts.”Illustrating that point, he added, “hypothetically, the president could mandate that all employees of federal contractors reduce their BMI (body mass index) below a certain number on the theory that obesity is a primary contributor to unhealthiness and absenteeism.”
Given the morally righteous zeal that the Biden administration has acted to support its policies (while undermining and silencing reasonable challenges that are grounded in law, reason, and science), this ruling is a step on the road to recovery from the damage caused by the pandemic restrictions and vaccine rules.
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