Healthcare workers nationwide can breathe a sigh of relief as a Federal Court places restraints on all states on Tuesday night.
Part of the ruling reads as: “If the separation of powers meant anything to the Constitutional framers, it meant that the three necessary ingredients to deprive a person of liberty or property –the power to make rules, to enforce them, and to judge their violations –could never fall into the same hands. Tiger Lily, LLC v. United States Housing and Urban Development, 5 F.4th666 (6th Cir. 2021). (Thapar, J. Concurrence). If the Executive branch is allowed to usurp the power of the Legislative branch to make laws, two of the three powers conferred by the Constitution would be in the same hands. If human nature and history teach anything, it is that civil liberties face grave risks when governments proclaim indefinite states of emergency.
This latest ruling comes on the cusp of an earlier decision this month to restrain OSHA from its Work Place Safety Rule on employers with 100 or more employees. The 5th Circuit panel explained, “OSHA was unable to prove exposure or even that Covid had infected all of the private workplaces upon which it was trying to force this mandate. The Court called this assertion by the Biden Administration and OSHA a “transparent stretch”. The Court identified other legal defects as well—like the fact that after 20 months the virus could hardly be described as a “new hazard”—but returned to the central premise that this OSHA rule “likely exceeds the federal government’s authority under the Commerce Clause because it regulates non-economic inactivity that falls squarely within the States’ police power. A person’s choice to remain unvaccinated and forgo regular testing is non-economic inactivity.” (We should note that in No. 45 of The Federalist, James Madison neatly summarizes this dual allocation of power: “The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite.” The Occupational Safety and Health Administration has suspended implementation and enforcement of the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate for private employers after a federal court blocked the measure.
These two Federal rulings are a big win for freedom and rights and stand firm until a higher court overturns them. Let’s hope that does not happen and the medical freedoms of all Americans are upheld.
