Part 3: Despite SCOTUS' Holding up the CMS Mandate, It's Crumbling and Needs to Go
I waited a while on this post about the Biden administration’s CMS mandate because the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold it is less settled law, and more the battle isn’t over.
If anything, it’s only heated up.
Democrats are checking the temperature of the country and getting scalded in the process. As a result, they are dropping the other mask mandates in their states like a bad habit. But many forget about doctors, nurses, first responders, and other healthcare providers who are still subject to this terrible and dangerous policy.
Despite the Supreme Court ruling to uphold the CMS mandate, it makes it no less unpopular, nonsensical, and ripe for a fall.
From SCOTUS Blog:
In Biden v. Missouri, the justices agreed to allow the Biden administration to enforce nationwide a rule that requires nearly all health care workers at facilities that participate in the Medicare and Medicaid programs to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 unless they qualify for a medical or religious exemption. The Department of Health and Human Services issued the rule, which applies to more than 10 million workers, in November, but two federal district courts – in Missouri and Louisiana – put the rule on hold in roughly half the states.
Note the difference in the agencies Biden chose to use. While OSHA focuses on health and safety as it relates to specific professions and work environments, Health and Human Services focuses on the overall health of the nation and its health service providers. That is one indication on why this ruling might have been made from a different lens.
In an unsigned opinion, the court emphasized that a key responsibility of the Department of Health and Human Services is “to ensure that the healthcare providers who care for Medicare and Medicaid patients protect their patients’ health and safety.” To do so, HHS has long required those providers to comply with a variety of conditions if they want to receive Medicare and Medicaid funding. Because COVID-19 “is a highly contagious, dangerous, and — especially for Medicare and Medicaid patients — deadly disease,” HHS determined that a vaccine mandate was necessary to protect patients because it would decrease the chances that health care workers would both contract the virus and pass it on to their patients. Such a mandate, the court wrote, “fits neatly within” the power given to HHS by Congress.
The “legality” of it makes sense. Actual reality? Not so much. Healthcare workers who are vaccinated and boosted are still contracting AND spreading COVID. Patients that are vaccinated and boosted are still contracting AND spreading COVID. So this ill-conceived mandate really no longer has basis.
Ron DeSantis clearly outlines the foolish moves “healthcare” corporations are employing, rather than rescinding the mandates.
While the healthcare corporations may pretend they are suffering, it is the American people who are in gravest danger.
But, according to Chief Justice Roberts, Justices Kavanaugh, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan, it is not SCOTUS’ role to interfere with an agency tasked with the security of the public’s health… or something like that.
Justice Clarence Thomas filed a dissenting opinion that was joined by Alito, Gorsuch, and Justice Amy Coney Barrett. Thomas complained that the Biden administration “proposes to find virtually unlimited vaccination power, over millions of healthcare workers, in” what he described as a “hodgepodge” of statutes – “in definitional provisions, a saving clause, and a provision regarding long-term care facilities’ sanitation procedures.” The Biden administration had not adequately explained, as far as Thomas was concerned, why Congress would have given HHS such power in relatively minor provisions. And indeed, Thomas noted, if Congress had wanted to give HHS the power to impose a vaccine mandate, “it would have done what it has done elsewhere — specifically authorize one.”
In his dissent on the ruling, Justice Clarence Thomas is making the same argument made in the OSHA opinion—it is Congress’ job, and not an unelected bureaucratic agency to either task an agency specifically or create a mandate to go through the proper process. Neither was done here, and it is still not being done. Congress, as per usez, is sitting on its hands and hoping that people will be distracted by the bright, shiny objects of dropped restrictions and forget all this ever happened.
But people who refuse to abide by the mandate are still being fired. And those who already took their stand no longer have jobs. Why, exactly, do they expect this to be forgotten?
Yet, the CMS mandate and its new timelines continue apace.
In a message to surveyors Jan. 14, 2022, CMS issued new 30- and 60-day deadlines for compliance for agencies in Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming.
Based on that timeline:
Phase 1 of the mandate, including policies around mandate implementation and a first vaccine dose for all employees, is due by Monday, Feb. 14, 2022.
Phase 2 of the mandate, when all eligible employees should be fully vaccinated with a second dose of a vaccine, is due by Tuesday, March 15, 2022.
On Jan. 20, 2022, CMS released deadlines for Texas, which had been the subject of a separate injunction:
Phase 1: Feb. 22, 2022.
Phase 2: March 21, 2022.
Providers in all other states are still subject to the deadlines announced in late December:
Phase 1: Jan. 27, 2022.
Phase 2: Feb. 28, 2022.
Despite this, Tennessee and 15 other states are not going gently into that good night:
And many are hoping that the massive resistance from the Canadian and U.S. Trucker Convoys will continue to keep the pressure on the unelected bureaucrats and the elected ones they control.
There is no freedom until all mandates are revoked.