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Mike Pence Joins Case Against Biden At The Supreme Court

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OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.


Former Vice President Mike Pence and his political action group is taking action against the Biden administration at the Supreme Court.

The Advancing American Freedom group filed an amicus brief arguing that the Occupational Safety and Health Administration is exceeding its authority from Congress and used an emergency temporary standard as a “shortcut” around the normal rulemaking process, The Washington Times reported.

The former vice president also argued that the Biden mandate that demands companies that have 100 or more employees to figure out who is unvaccinated and test them week is going to cause issues in the workplace.

“America is about freedom and the ability to make the best decision for your family or business, and Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate must be stopped in its tracks in order to preserve freedom, protect American livelihoods and businesses, and to safeguard our Constitution,” he said.

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The amicus brief said the advocacy group took a look at past emergency actions by OSHA and found that none of them attempted to require or coerce employees “to undertake a medical procedure (a vaccination) that cannot be undone at the end of the workday.”

The White House counters that while vaccination would make workers’ lives easier under the rule, the new standard amounts to a weekly testing requirement and does not actually compel a person to get injected with the vaccine.

The Supreme Court is taking up Mr. Biden’s OSHA rule after a volley of decisions in the lower courts. One appeals court stayed the ruling for a period before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit lifted the stay, prompting the justices to take up the issue.

The U.S. Supreme Court announced in December that it will hear oral arguments on January 7, 2022, in two separate challenges to Joe Biden’s coronavirus vaccine mandates.

The nation’s highest court will hear oral arguments challenging both Biden’s vaccine mandate for businesses with over 100 employees and for healthcare workers at facilities receiving Medicaid and Medicare funding.

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“Several Republican-led states, businesses, and other opponents have put Biden’s mandates in legal limbo for weeks, with federal courts having halted their enforcement pending the outcome of the legal challenges. While courts have generally upheld the rights of private businesses and schools to implement their own vaccine mandates, the lawsuits over Biden’s rules challenge whether the federal government has the authority to force employers and other entities to require vaccinations,” Fox News reported.

“Arguments over the mandate for healthcare workers at facilities receiving Medicaid and Medicare funding remains murkier, with a federal appeals court lifting the ban on that mandate last week. The ruling created an avenue for enforcement of the mandate across the country, though it remains to be seen how the Supreme Court will ultimately rule,” the Fox report added.

“Biden’s employer mandate was dealt its largest blow by U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana Judge Terry Doughty, who ruled the administration does not have the authority to bypass Congress on the issue and halted enforcement nationwide,” the report continued.

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“The reasoning across the cases is basically the same, which is that these statutes don’t give the president or the agency in question the authority to issue the mandates,” said Gregory Magarian, a constitutional law professor at Washington University in St. Louis.

“If the executive branch is allowed to usurp the power of the legislative branch to make laws, two of the three powers conferred by our Constitution would be in the same hands,” he wrote. “If human nature and history teach anything, it is that civil liberties face grave risks when governments proclaim indefinite states of emergency.”

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