OSHA has “officially filed its vaccine mandate rules for the COVID19 Jab. Affected employers have until Jan 4, 2022, to comply. In response, twenty-five states have filed or joined lawsuits in four different circuit courts to stop the mandate.
The states are Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia, and Wyoming.
Several groups have also joined with the states in each respective filing in the Fifth, Sixth, Eighth, and Eleventh Circuit Courts.
From Reason.com, edited and reformatted:
Texas filed suit in the Fifth Circuit, joined by Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Utah.
Kentucky filed in the Sixth Circuit, joined by Ohio, Tennessee, West Virginia, Idaho, and Oklahoma.
Missouri filed in the Eighth Circuit, joined by Nebraska, Arkansas, Iowa, North Dakota, South Dakota, New Hampshire, Arizona, Montana, Alaska, and Wyoming.
Florida filed suit in the Eleventh Circuit, joined by Georgia and Alabama.
And here is a brief look at the premise behind the suits, this one pulled from the 8th Circuit filing (which includes my home state of New Hampshire). Reformatted:
For over a century, the U.S. Supreme Court has recognized that policies on compulsory vaccination lie within the police powers of the States, and that “[t]hey are matters that do not ordinarily concern the national government.” Jacobson v. Massachusetts, 197 U.S. 11, 38 (1905).
Until quite recently, the Biden Administration agreed. The White House stated on July 23 of this year that mandating vaccines is
not the role of the federal government.” But on September 9, 2021, that position underwent a dramatic reversal.The President announced several sweeping vaccine mandates, including a vaccine mandate to be issued by OSHA that would apply to all employers who employ more than 100 employees. OSHA published this “emergency” mandate two months later, crafting an elaborate post hoc justification for a policy that the President had already ordered it to impose. This sweeping federal mandate encompasses, in OSHA’s own estimation, “two-thirds of all private-sector workers in the nation.”
This mandate is unconstitutional, unlawful, and unwise. The federal government lacks constitutional authority under its enumerated powers to issue this mandate, and its attempt to do so unconstitutionally infringes on the States’ powers expressly reserved by the Tenth Amendment.
OSHA also lacks statutory authority to issue the ETS, which it shoe-horned into statutes that govern workplace safety, and which were never intended to federalize public-health policy. OSHA’s justification for the mandate is not supported by substantial evidence in the record considered as a whole under 29 U.S.C. § 655(f), as the ETS fails to consider obvious distinctions and critical aspects of the problem.
Its unlawful mandate will cause injuries and hardship to working families, inflict economic disruption and staffing shortages on the States and private employers, and impose even greater strains on struggling labor markets and supply chains.
The Federal Government lacks the Constitutional Authority, OSHA lacks the statutory authority, and hey, it’s unlawful and will hurt families and America.