I believe most people are familiar with the Biblical tale of Solomon, the king, almost as wise as Joe Biden, solving the problem of who was the actual mother of a contested child.
Solomon proposed to split the child, knowing that the true mother would rather lose her child than kill it and that the spiteful imposter mother would agree to kill the child to spite the actual mother. Things ended happily ever after with the wise king reuniting the mother and child.
Our not-so-wise Supreme Court decided it was better to split the constitutional baby and call it a day. I am referring to the split ruling of the Court.
The Biden Regime could not use the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OHSA) to impose a vaccine mandate on private businesses with more than 100 employees. But it was OK for the Health and Human Services (HHS) agency to impose that same mandate on the employees of private medical facilities because they accept federal Medicare and Medicaid dollars.
I have read both court rulings. I am not a lawyer, but I have a well-developed sense of right and wrong. And I say the Supreme Court got the vaccine-mandate for medical institutions ruling horribly wrong, and in doing so, they have planted a landmine that could destroy our liberties.
First, let’s say what they got right, although it was for the wrong reason. The Supreme Court ruled that OSHA lacked the authority to impose such a mandate because the law that created OSHA “empowers the Secretary to set workplace safety standards, not broad public health measures.”
The Court ruled that this was a legal overreach, attempting to create a power not explicitly provided to the agency by Congress, the legislative body that made it. This is correct, and for this reason alone, there is justification to stop OSHAs dangerous overreach.
But missing from this narrow technical ruling: Who owns your body and who gets to make decisions regarding your health?
The failure to ask and answer the more basic and profound question (who owns your body?) is the reason why the Court can hold two opposite legal opinions simultaneously (private business – mandate no, private medical business – mandate yes).
In the case of medical facilities, the SCOTUS ruled that the “Congress authorized the Secretary [HHS] to promulgate, as a condition of a facility’s participation in the programs, such “requirements as [he] finds necessary in the interest of the health and safety of individuals who are furnished services in the institution.”
This authorization power was stretched like legal taffy by the narrowest majority (5-4) to create a state power over a medical worker’s body, giving the federal government the right to impose a vaccine mandate.
In his dissent to the HHS medical facility vaccine mandate, Justice Alito states the following.
“I join JUSTICE THOMAS’s dissent because I do not think that the Federal Government is likely to be able to show that Congress has authorized the unprecedented step of compelling over 10,000,000 healthcare workers to be vaccinated on pain of being fired. The support for the argument that the Federal Government possesses such authority is so obscure that the main argument now pressed by the government—that the authority is conferred by a hodgepodge of scattered provisions—was not prominently set out by the government until its reply brief in this Court.”
It must be acknowledged that the Supreme Court upheld a state’s (not fed’s) mandatory compulsory vaccination power in 1905 (Jacobson v. Massachusetts). The Supreme Court upheld a state’s mandatory compulsory smallpox vaccination law over the challenge of a pastor who alleged that it violated his religious liberty rights.
One could argue that (unfortunately) this issue has been settled and that it ain’t your body; it belongs to your State. I would argue that the Supreme Court got this one wrong and that “now” is always the best time to correct an injustice.
Remember, the primary purpose of a vaccine is to protect you, and no one is stopping you, your family, or anybody else from getting a vaccine to protect yourselves. But your fears, real or imagined, do not create an obligation on my part to, in this case, take a dangerous experimental gene therapy (it is not a vaccine) because it is “my body, my choice.”
But one does not have to agree with me on this matter to see that the federal medical facility vaccine mandate is wrong. The Court has created the federal government’s control over a person’s body based on an arbitrary funding source.
I hope you can see the danger of this rationale. It is not a great jump from this ruling to say that individuals in the Medicare or Medicaid program shall be subject to federal vaccine diktats or those that receive federal Social Security funding also lose the right to body autonomy. And once that power is given, they won’t stop with Covid.
The Supreme Court could have stayed in the lane of “settled law” and left this issue to the states, saying “no” to any federal mandates. Instead, they felt themselves wiser than Solomon and split the constitutional baby, expanding the power of the federal government yet again. I’m afraid that in doing so, they have paved the way to future assaults on our liberty, and if history is a guide, they will be coming shortly.
