The Culture War Has Warped the Supreme Court’s Judgment
If you read the legal language in the Occupational Safety and Health Act, which authorizes the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to act in an emergency capacity when workers face “grave danger from exposure to substances or agents determined to be toxic or physically harmful or from new hazards,” and when “such emergency standard is necessary to protect employees from such danger,” you might think that the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate stood a good chance of surviving the Supreme Court’s review.
But if you watched Fox News at all over the past year, you would have guessed that it was doomed.
Yesterday, the Supreme Court blocked the Biden administration’s mandate, which compelled companies with more than 100 employees to require their workers to be vaccinated against COVID-19 or tested regularly. (The Court narrowly allowed a similar requirement for health-care workers to remain in place.) The majority’s reasoning is that because the hazard of COVID-19 is present outside the workplace, OSHA exceeded the authority it has to regulate workplace safety.
“COVID-19 can and does spread at home, in schools, during sporting events, and everywhere else that people gather,” the unsigned opinion reads. “That kind of universal risk is no different from the day-to-day dangers that all face from crime, air pollution, or any number of communicable diseases.”
This is laughable logic. OSHA regulates many, many hazards. Moreover, unlike attending a sporting event as a spectator, people to go to work, unless they’re lucky enough to be, say, a Supreme Court justice, in which case .
