SCOTUS will hear oral arguments on the challenges to Biden's OSHA/CMS vaccine mandates on Jan. 7

[brucejoel99]

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/22/us/politics/osha-vaccine-mandate-supreme-court.html

WASHINGTON - The Supreme Court said on Wednesday evening that it would hold a special hearing next month to assess the legality of two Biden administration initiatives aimed at addressing the coronavirus. One requires large companies to have their workers get coronavirus vaccines or be tested weekly, while the other requires health care workers at hospitals that receive federal money to be vaccinated against the virus.

The court said it would move with exceptional speed, setting the cases for argument on Friday, Jan. 7. The justices had not been scheduled to return to the bench until the following Monday.

Both sets of cases had been on what critics call the court's shadow docket, in which the court decides emergency applications, sometimes on matters of great consequence, without full briefing and argument. The court's decision to hear arguments on the applications may have been a response to mounting criticism of that practice.

[2016]

Conservative Justices are sceptical over Bidens Vaccine Mandates. While the Health Care Worker Mandate will potentially stay the Test or Vaccine Mandate for Private Businesses will almost certainly be struck down.

[SnowLabrador]

They blocked it. If you didn't vote for Hillary in 2016 and were eligible, feel the wrath of a million suns.

[2016]

They blocked it. If you didn't vote for Hillary in 2016 and were eligible, feel the wrath of a million suns.

Justices did the right thing. OSHA Mandate was unlawful!

[brucejoel99]

They blocked it. If you didn't vote for Hillary in 2016 and were eligible, feel the wrath of a million suns.

Justices did the right thing. OSHA Mandate was unlawful!

The justices overturned their own precedent, without even having the guts to explicitly say as much, so that they could find the OSHA mandate unlawful. Under their previous precedent, as was applicable both in 1970 when the 91st Congress passed the OSH Act & in 2021 when OSHA invoked their legislative mandate so as to issue the vaccine mandate, it wasn't.

[Skill and Chance]

They blocked it. If you didn't vote for Hillary in 2016 and were eligible, feel the wrath of a million suns.

Justices did the right thing. OSHA Mandate was unlawful!

The justices overturned their own precedent, without even having the guts to explicitly say as much, so that they could find the OSHA mandate unlawful. Under their previous precedent, as was applicable both in 1970 when the 91st Congress passed the OSH Act & in 2021 when OSHA invoked their legislative mandate so as to issue the vaccine mandate, it wasn't.

Ehhh... this was always a long shot.  The overwhelming majority of all OSHA emergency temporary standards have been blocked in court, and most of them were a lot more specific and less sweeping than this was.  Interestingly, the opinion issuing the stay almost invited OSHA to come back with a new mandate targeted specifically to high density indoor workplaces.  Perhaps a standard based on number employees per square foot of working space would hold up?

4 votes against the Medicare/Medicaid facilities mandate was pretty surprising, though!

What do you think will happen with the federal employee and federal contractor mandates?

[brucejoel99]

They blocked it. If you didn't vote for Hillary in 2016 and were eligible, feel the wrath of a million suns.

Justices did the right thing. OSHA Mandate was unlawful!

The justices overturned their own precedent, without even having the guts to explicitly say as much, so that they could find the OSHA mandate unlawful. Under their previous precedent, as was applicable both in 1970 when the 91st Congress passed the OSH Act & in 2021 when OSHA invoked their legislative mandate so as to issue the vaccine mandate, it wasn't.

Ehhh... this was always a long shot. 

Oh, of course the mandate's survival was always a long shot, but that doesn't make the disingenuousness of the majority's opinion striking it down any less evident. If intelligible principles truly mean nothing anymore & nondelegation is the law of the land again, then it'd be nice for the Court to just explicitly say so so that we can stop legislating & regulating blind.

The overwhelming majority of all OSHA emergency temporary standards have been blocked in court, and most of them were a lot more specific and less sweeping than this was.

Actually, this was the 24th ETS in OSHA history & only the 7th to be blocked; 17 either weren't challenged or were upheld.

Interestingly, the opinion issuing the stay almost invited OSHA to come back with a new mandate targeted specifically to high density indoor workplaces.  Perhaps a standard based on number employees per square foot of working space would hold up?

I fear that this Court stating that OSHA at least has the authority to regulate occupation-specific risks related to COVID-19 is equivalent to Lucy convincing Charlie Brown that he's finally gonna get to kick that football this time.

4 votes against the Medicare/Medicaid facilities mandate was pretty surprising, though!

Less surprising if you consider the Court as follows:

4 votes to invent a new, amorphous standard for nondelegation by using OSHA as a vehicle to issue a ruling on a preliminary injunction, the likes of which are only ever supposed to be granted when the law is indisputably clear, under any circumstances.

2 votes to do it under some circumstances.

3 votes against it.

What do you think will happen with the federal employee and federal contractor mandates?

The health-care workers mandate was upheld, so I don't see a challenge to those federal mandates working out either.