OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
The attorney general of Louisiana is concerned about what he heard from the Supreme Court regarding President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate for private businesses.
The court is set to decide if the mandate is Constitutional or not, but some of the Justices appeared to have their eyes more on politics he thinks, The Daily Caller reported.
“I feel about the same that I did going in,” he said to the host of The Vince Coglianese Show and Daily Caller editorial director Vince Coglianese. “I really believe that the law and the facts are squarely on our side. Of course, as always, I get concerned about the politics of the Court.”
But, he said, “it seemed like the Court today took this issue very seriously.”
His state is one of the states that is suing the administration because they believe the federal government does not have the authority to issue such a mandate.
He said that the vaccine mandate case “could be one of the most important cases that is decided in our lifetimes,” as he complained about some of the Justice’s apparent lack of knowledge.
“I was disappointed with the politics of those justices,” he said. “I guess I was a little chagrined that we didn’t strike back at them. Justice Breyer did it again and again and again.”
“How many of those cases are going to be hospitalized? Of those cases that are hospitalized how many are going to die from that? If you look at where we are today versus where we were two years ago, there’s a sea of difference. And I’ve said this again and again. We have not said thank you enough to our medical providers who have worked to find ways to keep people alive. Found ways to treat people who have gotten this virus. We just understand how to protect ourselves from these viruses, and hearing those justices inject, without any backup, and I think you’re right, some of what they said was quite frankly factually wrong, just smells of politics into the court,” he said.
The Justices began hearing arguments on Friday and some of the liberal judges shared some ridiculous thoughts on what they believed were facts regarding COVID-19, The Federalist reported.
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) rolled out its emergency temporary standard demanding that private employers with 100 or more employees require vaccinations at the request of the Biden administration late last year. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a temporary stay, however, preventing enforcement.
Challengers of the OSHA standard argued on Friday that the agency has no right to force a medical decision on workers, but several justices pushed back on this idea using false narratives about COVID-19 to justify the federal government’s vaccine mandate.
Justice Elena Kagan suggested that getting the vaccine reduces the spread of COVID-19, a dubious claim that’s contested by the rapidly rising number of breakthrough cases worldwide. Kagan’s opinion is that “this is the policy that is most geared to stopping all this.”
“There’s nothing else that will perform that function better than incentivizing people strongly to vaccinate themselves. So, you know, whatever necessary means, whatever grave means, why isn’t this necessary and grave?” the Justice said.
“We do not contest that COVID is a grave danger,” National Federation of Independent Business attorney Scott Keller responded. “But when the power for it to be necessary… an agency has to consider and explain alternatives.”
Justice Stephen Breyer also appeared to believe that being vaccinated would stop people from spreading the virus, and argued that the argument that more people would leave the workforce due to the mandates was moot because “more may quit when they discover they have to work together with unvaccinated others because that means they may get the disease.”
“And more will quit because they’ll maybe die, or maybe they will be in the hospital, or maybe they’ll be sick and have to stay home for two weeks,” he said.
He also appeared to claim that if everyone was vaccinated the pandemic would stop and no one would get the disease before saying that there were “750 million new cases yesterday,” in the United States, even though the population of the United States is around 331 million people.
And Justice Sonia Sotomayor continued with her own alternative facts.
“Catching COVID keeps people out of the workplace for extraordinary periods of time,” the justice said.
And she said that “those numbers show that omicron is as deadly and causes as much serious disease in the unvaccinated as delta did,” even as studies show that the Omicron variant is significantly less severe.
She also made the false claim that “hospitals are almost all full capacity,” and said that more than 100,000 children are hospitalized with COVID and on ventilators, which is also not true.
“The current national pediatric COVID census per HHS is 3,342. Many/most incidental,” Phil Kerpen said.
