A federal appeals court in New Orleans has halted the Biden administration’s mandatory vaccine or testing requirement for private businesses, delivering a devastating defeat to one of President Biden’s signature public health policies.
“We are thrilled that the Fifth Circuit has stopped this mandate for now. We remain dedicated to ending it permanently,” First Liberty Institute president Kelly Shackelford told the Todd Starnes Radio Show. “The President is supposed to protect people of faith, not conscript private employers into his ideological war.”
A three-judge panel said the mandate “grossly exceeds OSHA’s statutory authority,”
“Rather than a delicately handled scalpel, the Mandate is a one-size fits-all sledgehammer that makes hardly any attempt to account for differences in workplaces (and workers) that have more than a little bearing on workers’ varying degrees of susceptibility to the supposedly ‘grave danger’ the Mandate purports to address,” they wrote.
They said they believed that the ruling imposed a financial burden on businesses and potentially violated the commerce clause of the Constitution.
“The Mandate imposes a financial burden upon them by deputizing their participation in OSHA’s regulatory scheme, exposes them to severe financial risk if they refuse or fail to comply, and threatens to decimate their workforces (and business prospects) by forcing unwilling employees to take their shots, take their tests, or hit the road,” they wrote.