I will just drop this here,
The 5th Circuit Just Rewarded a Brazen Heist of President Power
On Wednesday night, the 5th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals upheld one of the most egregious abuses of the federal judiciary in memory. By a 2–1 vote, the court refused to halt a Trump judge’s nationwide injunction barring President Joe Biden from requiring his own workforce to get vaccinated against COVID-19. The majority rewarded anti-vaxxers for gaming the system by asking twelve different federal judges for an injunction before finding one lawless enough to grant one.
The 5th Circuit was already
the most radical appeals court in the country. Now it is complicit in anti-vaxxers’ corrupt quest to transfer a core executive power from the president to a single unelected judge.
It’s important to understand at the outset that this case,
Feds for Medical Freedom v. Biden, is fundamentally different from other vaccine-related lawsuits. Previous cases tested the limits of the executive branch’s authority to compel private companies—including federal contractors and recipients of government funding—to impose a vaccine mandate (or a vaccinate-or-test policy) on their workers.
Feds for Medical Freedom involves a very different workforce: the executive branch of the United States government. The president, of course, is the head of the executive branch, and
according to the Supreme Court, he holds
all executive power. Although the chief executive often delegates oversight of his roughly
2.1 million employees, he is, as a constitutional matter, their boss. Congress has acknowledged this fact in
a sweeping law that allows the president to “prescribe regulations for the conduct of employees in the executive branch.” And the Supreme Court has recognized that, under both this statute and his inherent constitutional authority, the president
bears responsibility for “the efficient operation of the executive branch.”
Presidents have exercised this power
in too many ways to count. For instance, it forms the basis of the government’s drug testing program for federal employees. And it authorizes a
labyrinth of ethics rules that strictly limit current and former employees of the executive branch from lobbying the government. Biden relied on this power in mandating vaccines for his own employees on Sept. 14, 2021. “Ensuring the health and safety of the federal workforce and the efficiency of the civil service,” he
explained, requires “all available steps” to avoid the spread of COVID-19. And the CDC “has found that the best way to do so is to be vaccinated.”
Anti-vaxxers across the country promptly pummeled federal courts with requests for an injunction to halt this order. There were several profound flaws in their arguments, beyond the obvious fact that the chief executive—not an unelected judge—calls the shots for executive branch employees. Most notably, a thicket of statutes and
precedents forbid these workers from filing lawsuits before going through lengthy administrative procedures—a process these plaintiffs sought to skip over. One by one, these lawsuits failed; in total,
12 different district court judges across the ideological spectrum shot them down. The plaintiffs lost in
Arizona,
Colorado,
Oklahoma,
Maryland,
Texas,
Washington State,
Florida (
before two different judges), and
the District of Columbia (
before three different judges). By any standard, the litigation was a total wipe-out, a refutation of every argument put forth against Biden. The matter seemed settled.
Then came U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Vincent Brown. A Donald Trump nominee, Brown is a Federalist Society stalwart who gained notoriety for
attempting to overturn marriage equality in Texas from his perch as a state court judge. When an anti-vax group called Feds for Medical Freedom asked Brown for an injunction, he looked at the hundreds of pages of reasoning produced by 12 of his colleagues and thought: I know better. Then, in a threadbare
20-page decision, the judge declared Biden’s mandate unconstitutional and issued a nationwide injunction barring its enforcement. He provided one sentence of justification for freezing the policy in every state, including those where judges had upheld it: a narrower injunction, he asserted, would “prove unwieldy and would only cause more confusion.”
Brown’s decision was not just
laughably wrong, radical, and arrogant; it was, itself, unconstitutional—a staggering violation of the separation of powers. Never before in U.S. history has a single federal judge attempted to seize the president’s authority over his own employees to such a brazen and extreme degree. The Justice Department swiftly
appealed to the 5th Circuit, pointing out that Brown had “essentially nullified a dozen other district court decisions.”
On Wednesday, however, a split panel of judges refused to overturn Brown’s injunction without bothering to explain its reasoning. The two judges in the majority were Jerry Smith, a Ronald Reagan nominee, and Don Willett, a Trump nominee. Judge Stephen A. Higginson, a moderate Barack Obama nominee, penned a
dissent that reflected a kind of stunned outrage. “The public interest is not served,” Higginson wrote, “by a single Article III district judge, lacking public health expertise and made unaccountable through life tenure, telling the President of the United States, in his capacity as CEO of the federal workforce, that he cannot take the same lifesaving workplace safety measures as these private sector CEOs.”
That and the dead one are food quick
It looks like they don't want anyone playing by the rules they themselves play by....
Idiots.
