Biden’s Three-Card Monte Vaccine Strategy
I think the President should have taken a different approach because I think the approach he took is one that is going to harden positions and make it harder for people to want to get vaccinated. I am pro-vaccine, I'm anti-mandate. I think the vaccines work. I'm proof the vaccines work. My wife is as well. There are breakthrough cases, but again, this is part of the problem. It now turns out the media has overstated breakthrough cases. It turns out they were talking like almost anyone could get a mild case of the Delta variant if they were vaccinated. It turns out it's one in 5,000. You have greater risks for birth control medicine than you do from a vaccine, and yet we're not worried about birth control medicine. If people are freaked out about the vaccine, it works. The problem is that the President was deeply divisive in how he approached it, here's the start of his speech.
President Biden:
Even as the Delta Variant 19 as COVID-19 has been hitting this country hard, we have the tools to combat the virus. If we can come together as a country and use those tools. If we raise our vaccination rate, protect ourselves and others with masking and expanded testing and identify people who are infected, we can, and we will turn the tide on COVID-19. It will take a lot of hard work, it's going to take some time. Many of us are frustrated with the nearly 80 million Americans who are still not vaccinated, even though the vaccine is safe, effective, and free.
We're frustrated. Listen, I do know a lot of people who are frustrated with those who are unvaccinated. Sadly, I know someone else who died yesterday, having been on a ventilator for a week who didn't get vaccinated and passed away and leaves behind three toddlers. It's sad, and I get the frustration, but love your neighbor should be the approach here, not hate on your neighbor. And Biden seems to be giving license to people to hate their neighbor.
President Biden:
What more do you need to see? We've made vaccinations free, safe, and convenient. The vaccine is FDA approved. Over 200 million Americans have gotten at least one shot. We've been patient with but our patience is wearing thin and your refusal has cost all of us.
Your refusal. It's all your fault, essentially. Actually, I remember they were saying it was a pandemic of the unvaccinated, whatever happened to that? Now it's their fault that people, other unvaccinated people who've made the choice of taking the risk. That doesn't work for me.
President Biden:
The bottom line, we're going to protect vaccinated workers from unvaccinated coworkers. We're going to reduce the spread of COVID-19 by increasing the share of the workforce that is vaccinated in businesses all across America. My plan will extend the vaccination requirements that I previously issued in the healthcare field. Already, I've announced we'll be requiring vaccinations for all nursing home workers who treat patients on Medicare and Medicaid, because I have that federal authority. Tonight I'm using that same authority to expand that to cover those who work in hospitals, home health care facilities.
So he's going to expand it, and it's going to go to private sector companies, not just the public sector. Now listen, you need to understand this. This is very important, for perspective, there is well-settled case law. It is perfectly constitutional and perfectly legal for the President of the United States to force members of the military to get vaccinated. I know members of the military right now who do not want to get vaccinated and would very much like to leave the military before being forced to. I get that. I've got distinct frustrations here and just please listen to me here, I think the vaccines work. I know enough to know the science and have talked to enough scientists, doctors, epidemiologists, and the like to know all of the fears about long-term effects, they're overblown.
The way vaccines work, the effects come early. There are medications that have long-term effects, but with vaccines, the effects come early. They don't show up late. And so all of these concerns that 10 years from now, 15 years from now, maybe there'll be problems are not legitimate. There are concerns that are raised by malicious people on the internet that other people have now fallen victim to, and I get that, and I get there are people that don't want to be bullied. I don't know at this point how to convince someone to take the vaccine. I can tell you it was perfectly safe. My wife has it. I had it. My kids have it. I understand the concern of pregnant women. I do understand the concern, I think the government downplays it. I do understand the legitimacy of people who said I've had COVID, they say I've got enough antibodies, I've got more antibodies than you get from the vaccine. Why should I get it? I think that's legitimate.
But there is well-settled law, it is not in dispute, the President can force the military to get vaccinated. He can force federal employees, but can he force the private sector to do it through OSHA regulations? OSHA, the occupational safety hazard administration, is a congressional-created entity run in the executive branch. The President is making COVID vaccines mandatory through OSHA regulation and in so doing, does he have the authority to do it? Now you should understand, OSHA is a super-entity. It is a super agency. It has massive broad power to oversee the workplace in America. It actually legitimately does. But does it have enough to do this? Something that it has not otherwise done before? Did Congress delegate it? Now, this gets a little esoteric and you’ve just got to follow along with me.
Again, I'm trying to make you more educated than the other person you're going to come into contact with so you can explain this to them. There's a Supreme Court case called Chevron. You will hear lawyers go off to sleep arguing about Chevron. Chevron is a case by which the courts allow broad discretion to government agencies in the executive branch to interpret their congressional authority as they see fit. For years, there has been a movement to curtail Chevron. One of the defenders of Chevron, interestingly enough, was Antonin Scalia. If Congress delegates authority to the executive branch, you allow the agency the authority to interpret the rules as it sees fit, Congress writes very nebulous laws and then the agency interprets those laws and the powers they're from. But there has been a movement over time to reign it in. And luckily some of the loudest voices on reigning in Chevron are people you may have heard of a guy named John Roberts, a guy named Brett Kavanaugh, a guy named Neil Gorsuch, and a guy named Clarence Thomas.
So you've got Roberts, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Thomas four members of a nine-member Supreme court who have already come out in various ways and said, we've got to reign in Chevron, add in Alito and then Amy Coney Barrett and you probably do have a majority of the Supreme Court willing to rein in Chevron. So the effect of the Biden administration is probably to not only do something that they don't have the power to do, but gives the courts the power now to finally reign in the Chevron standard, which has been abused by regulatory agencies for decades.
That gives you what Joe Biden's actual strategy is. His strategy is actually twofold here. It's not to mandate vaccines. On the surface certainly, it is. The President says he's going to do this.
President Biden:
We must increase vaccinations among the unvaccinated with new vaccination requirements.
Certainly, he thinks he's going to do that. Publicly, he needed to get aggressive. His poll numbers are trending down. Not just because of Afghanistan, but because of his handling of COVID. So he's going to come out and he's going to look tough, but this is becoming a pattern with this administration where he's publicly doing something he privately knows he cannot do so that he can blame Trump's judges and make this the Court's problem, not his. This is like the eviction moratorium. The Court upheld it 5-4. Brett Kavanaugh, one of the fifth votes in June, released a concurrent opinion saying he doesn’t think this is constitutional, but it ends in a month and they need time to wind it down so don't extend it.
So the Biden administration didn't extend it. The congressional Democrats bellyached about it. They didn't do anything. The day that the eviction moratorium was set to expire, Joe Biden does nothing. The Democrats do nothing. Two days after it expires, Joe Biden holds a press conference and says, I think what I'm doing is unconstitutional, but I'm going to do it and try to buy some time so I'm going to reimpose the eviction moratorium and sure enough, the Supreme Court throws it out. Everybody knew the Supreme Court was going to throw it out, and then Joe Biden can say the problem is those conservative SOBs at the Supreme Court. We need to pack the court. It's their fault, not mine.
He's doing it now with this. So when the Supreme Court comes out and says, “OSHA doesn't have the power under the statute that created OSHA to do this. Sorry. We're reigning in the Chevron standard now. You can't do this.” Joe Biden will say “look I tried, I tried to do mandates, but if those SOBs on the Supreme Court stopped me. We need to pack the court.
I would point out that back in December, Joe Biden said he didn't have the power to do this.
President Biden:
No, I don't think it should be mandatory. I wouldn't demand it to be mandatory, but I would do everything in my power, just like, I don't think masks have to be made mandatory nationwide.
That was Joe Biden in December. Now he's reversed himself on this. Joe Biden knows he doesn't have the power to do this. You do need to understand superficially there's an argument to be made that he does. Also, you need to understand there's a side angle here. A lot of the people who will be publicly making the argument that you can't do this are the people who also argue that Roe vs. Wade needs to be overturned. And the argument a lot of people are making the “my body, my choice” argument is the argument that abortion supporters make. So Biden by doing this is setting up a chess play politically for pro-lifers to undermine their own arguments. So you've got to be very careful about how you argue this. You need to be thoughtful about how you argue this, because otherwise, you're undermining your pro-life stance the way you're arguing.
The legit argument is that OSHA does not have the authority under its creation. It has very broad authority, but this is too far. It doesn't have that level of healthcare authority in the workforce to be able to do this. Also, you should want no President of the United States to do this. Now, just follow with me here on this point. During the Obama administration, the Obama administration hit on a new way to enforce environmental regulations against coal companies, particularly for the collection of coal ash. The EPA passed guidelines with a progressive mandate to allow private citizens, to sue the power companies. For the very first time, environmental regulation like that could be enforced through private litigation. A lot of progressives started suing power companies over their handling of coal ash.
In Texas, conservatives were inspired by what the progressive had done and passed a law that allows private citizen enforcement of abortion prohibitions and shut down abortion in Texas using what the Obama administration had done on environmental regulations. Essentially, they were used to advance the pro-life cause. So for those of you who are worried Donald Trump was an authoritarian, for those of you who are scared to death of the precedent a future President could set, you might want to be thinking about the precedent Joe Biden is setting by allowing OSHA to mandate vaccines. Because what happens if Donald Trump were to get reelected? What happens if Ron DeSantis gets reelected? What precedence is Joe Biden setting that Republicans will use in the future against progressives? And don't say it can't happen because this is a real-world example. The Obama administration with the environmental regulations giving private lawsuit enforcement power, pro-lifers used that in Texas to shut down abortion. So you really want to play this game? It's a dangerous game, but there's one larger overriding point to all of what Joe Biden is doing. It is the day before September 11th. Y'all, ain't talking about Afghanistan, are you?