He has the Supreme Court come in on their day off. A special hearing on the White House’s two vaccine mandates will be held by the Supreme Court today. It will decide whether or not they can go through.
It all started in November, when President Biden set a January 4 deadline for people who work in government-funded health care facilities to be vaccinated or get tested every week, and for people who work in businesses with more than 100 people in the US to be vaccinated or tested every week. The deadline was pushed back to February 9 because the announcement caused a legal mess that looked like a Whattaburger after 11pm.
By the end of November, 12 states had filed a lawsuit against the Biden administration because they didn’t want to follow the law. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit blocked the mandate, then the 6th Circuit blocked that block, and the case was sent to the U.S. Supreme Court, which will decide the case.
A group of people don’t like what they’
Business owners, religious groups, and Republican-led state governors are going to say that the federal government is going too far with the vaccine mandates, and that they could make it more difficult for businesses to find workers. They also say that employers will have to pay for the Covid tests out of their Friday pizza party fund.
This is one thing you need to know about today’s hearing: SCOTUS won’t be deciding if the mandates are legal, but whether the Biden team can put them into place while lower courts are still deciding.
It’s hard to predict what the court will say because the federal government has never tried to make employers follow a vaccine-or-test policy. People on the Supreme Court aren’t very fond of very strict federal rules. This is because they have a 6–3 conservative majority. In August, the Supreme Court turned down an extension of the federal eviction moratorium because the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention didn’t have the power to do it.
A group of people who were on the same side as the other justices voted to uphold vaccine mandates in New York and Maine.
Looking at the next few years…
People at some businesses aren’t waiting for the decision to be made before they act. Everyone who works for Starbucks in the United States was told on Monday that they had to get vaccinated or have regular tests starting on February 9.