The Supreme Court has stopped the Biden administration from enforcing a requirement that employees at large businesses be vaccinated against COVID-19 or undergo weekly testing and wear a mask on the job.
In a concurrent decision, the High Court approved vaccine mandates on most health care workers.
The decisions, which came during a spike of largely Omicron-variant COVID-19 cases across the US, came down six days after the justices heard arguments in both cases.
The first case dealt with the order from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration which would have mandated that businesses with at least 100 employees require their staff be vaccinated or undergo weekly testing.
Opponents to the rule argued the agency was overstepping its power. Scott Keller, who represented the National Federation of Independent Business, told the court that even if OSHA had issued just a masking mandate, the agency “doesn’t have the ability to set a nationwide COVID rule by emergency rule.”
The court’s conservative majority concluded the Biden administration overstepped its authority by seeking to impose the OSHA rule. More than 80 million people would have been affected.
“OSHA has never before imposed such a mandate. Nor has Congress. Indeed, although Congress has enacted significant legislation addressing the COVID–19 pandemic, it has declined to enact any measure similar to what OSHA has promulgated here,” the conservatives wrote in an unsigned opinion.
In dissent, the court’s three liberals — Justices Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor — argued that it was the court that was overreaching by substituting its judgment for that of health experts. “Acting outside of its competence and without legal basis, the Court displaces the judgments of the Government officials given the responsibility to respond to workplace health emergencies,” Justices Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor wrote in a joint dissent.
apnews.com
