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U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh has asked the Biden administration to respond directly to a flurry of appeals of a Sixth Circuit ruling, which allowed OSHA to move ahead with the vaccine mandate for businesses.
“The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals initially halted the planned implementation of the mandate – which applies to businesses with 100 or more employees – after President Biden announced it earlier this fall. Due to a large number of cases against the mandate all around the country, the Sixth Circuit was chosen to hear a consolidated appeal of all of those cases,” Fox Business reported.
“The Sixth Circuit overruled the Fifth Circuit, prompting the many businesses, trade associations, and religious groups who sued against the mandate to ask the Supreme Court to step in and block it yet again,” the report added.
Fox continues:
A group of business associations, including the National Federation of Independent Businesses, decried OSHA’s vaccine mandate – via a rulemaking process called Emergency Temporary Standard (ETS) – as an attempt “to use brute regulatory power to impel vaccination of millions of Americans.”
“For many of the Business Associations’ members, the harms discussed above are threatening the very viability of their business. As several employers reported: ‘this could be catastrophic to our organization’; ‘[this] could put us out of business,’” the business associations wrote in their brief to the Supreme Court.
The appeals went to Kavanaugh because of geography – he oversees emergency appeals from the Sixth Circuit.
The Supreme Court is not considering the full validity of the OSHA ETS on vaccines. It is only considering whether to temporarily halt the implementation of the rule while litigation in lower courts decides the issue on the merits. If the rule goes into effect when the Biden administration wants it to, tens of millions of workers in businesses across the country will be subject to the mandate and forced to either get a vaccination or submit to a weekly COVID testing regime.
Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt and three companies requested that the U.S. Supreme Court stay the Biden administration’s vaccine mandates for private businesses with 100 or more employees.
Three companies — Phillips Manufacturing & Tower Company, Sixarp LLC, and Oberg Industries LLC — filed an emergency application for an injunction on Friday, saying the Biden administration is pursuing unlimited federal executive power in the vaccine mandate for private businesses.
This move could be bad for the Biden administration given the Supreme Court has slapped down Biden’s mandates several times already.
“There is no dispute among the parties about the common desire to end the scourge of the COVID-19 pandemic,” reads the application. “The arguments advanced by the Executive Branch admit to no cognizable limits on federal executive power.”
“Frustrated with a minority of Americans’ medical choices, the Executive Branch has attempted to control and surveil the vaccination schedules of enormous swaths of the country’s population,” the application added.
Meanwhile, the vaccine mandate will also jeopardize the companies’ already struggling recruitment efforts, the three applicants said in the application.
Schmitt also asked SCOTUS to stay the Biden administration’s sweeping vaccine mandate.
“This was always destined to go to the nation’s highest court and I’ll continue to fight back against this breathtaking overreach,” he wrote in a Twitter post.
