President Joe Biden’s coronavirus vaccine mandate was dealt a major blow in a ruling late Friday as the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals blocked the requirement, calling it “staggeringly overbroad.”
The three-judge panel in New Orleans ruled that Biden’s mandate “grossly exceeds OSHA’s statutory authority,” writing that “rather than a delicately handled scalpel, the Mandate is a one-size fits-all sledgehammer that makes hardly any attempt to account for differences in workplaces (and workers) that have more than a little bearing on workers’ varying degrees of susceptibility to the supposedly ‘grave danger’ the Mandate purports to address,” the Daily Wire reported.
Judges Stuart Kyle Duncan, Edith H. Jones, and Kurt D. Engelhardt said the mandate imposed financial burdens on businesses that could potentially violate the Constitution. The panel of judges wrote, “The Mandate imposes a financial burden upon them by deputizing their participation in OSHA’s regulatory scheme, exposes them to severe financial risk if they refuse or fail to comply, and threatens to decimate their workforces (and business prospects) by forcing unwilling employees to take their shots, take their tests, or hit the road.”
The ruling comes after the court stayed Biden’s order last Saturday, writing that there were potentially “grave statutory and constitutional issues with the Mandate.”
