On Wednesday, the U.S. Supreme Court announced that it will hear oral arguments challenging President Joe Biden's COVID-19 vaccine mandates in early January.
The cases at hand challenge Biden's mandates requiring businesses with more than 100 employees and for healthcare professionals working at facilities receiving Medicaid and Medicare funding to be vaccinated against COVID-19, Fox News reports.
According to the Associated Press, the Supreme Court will hear both challenges to the vaccine mandates on Jan. 7, 2022.
So far, the enforcement of both mandates has been halted by federal courts, in which judges argued against the federal government's authority to impose such orders on the nation's employers.
"The reasoning across the cases is basically the same, which is that these statutes don't give the president or the agency in question the authority to issue the mandates," explained Gregory Magarian, a constitutional law professor at Washington University in St. Louis.
U.S. District Court Judge of the Western District of Louisiana Terry Doughty dealt the biggest blow to Biden's business mandate when he ruled that the administration had no authority to enforce the mandate since it was never taken up in Congress.
"If the executive branch is allowed to usurp the power of the legislative branch to make laws, two of the three powers conferred by our Constitution would be in the same hands," Doughty wrote in his ruling. "If human nature and history teach anything, it is that civil liberties face grave risks when governments proclaim indefinite states of emergency."
Last week, however, a federal appeals court overturned the ban placed on Biden's healthcare worker mandate, which will now be taken up to the nation's high court.
Regardless of the recent legal challenges, the Biden administration maintains that vaccine mandates work on the federal level.
"We know vaccination requirements work," a White House official said. "The federal government, the country's largest employer, has successfully implemented its requirement in a way that has boosted vaccinations and avoids any disruptions to operations."
Photo courtesy: Adam Szuscik/Unsplash
Milton Quintanilla is a freelance writer and content creator. He is a contributing writer for CrosswalkHeadlines and the host of the For Your Soul Podcast, a podcast devoted to sound doctrine and biblical truth. He holds a Masters of Divinity from Alliance Theological Seminary.
