OPINION:
The U.S. Supreme Court is due, in essence, to decide whether or not Joe Biden’s presidential dictates, through federal agencies, for tens of millions of Americans to get the COVID-19 shot or lose their jobs meet the smell test of the Constitution.
They don’t.
“The cases came to the court last week on an emergency basis, and the formal question in both disputes is whether the government should be allowed to enforce the policies while litigation challenging them continues,” SCOTUSblog.com wrote. “But the justices’ views on whether to grant emergency relief will likely be influenced by their views on the merits of the underlying challenges themselves.”
That sets the whole vaccine mandate legal disputes in the camp of the high court.
But the fact the nation needs the U.S. Supreme Court to tell this only underscores the intense peril Americans now face.
After all, it was just a few months ago Biden himself acknowledged neither the federal government nor the White House had the authority to mandate vaccines. Now he’s steadfastly insisting the executive, by itself, does. That’s the speed at which liberty can fall.
Just to recap, the two cases before the nation’s highest court deal with Biden’s use of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services agencies to mandate millions of private sector and health field workers get the shot — or shots, as the ever-increasing boosters’ case may be. CMS, in going forward with implementation, never hosted a public comment period; never solicited information showing the costs of the mandate. OSHA, meanwhile, has already been slapped down by the Fifth Circuit for overreaching its authorities, only to be buoyed again by the Sixth Circuit’s Court of Appeals.
But seriously, common sense alone prompts the conclusion that if OSHA can stretch its role as a workplace safety regulator to include vaccinations, then why not, say, tobacco smoking?
Why not, by the law of Pandora’s Box, off-site tobacco smoking?
After all, if OSHA is to become the arbiter of all health-related issues that could impact workers, then the behaviors of employees during all hours of the day and night would become subject to agency concern. OSHA’s powers alone could bring about the largest nanny state this side of communist China. Combine that with a court OK to CMS and America could actually become the new communist China.
The problem with these cases going to the high court is not simply that they put in jeopardy the liberties of Americans everywhere who were born into a nation where freedoms for the individual are supposed to come from God, not government. The even bigger problem to consider is that these cases made it to SCOTUS in the first place.
How far we’ve strayed from the concept of limited government.
How far the left has managed to insert its footprint.
How far the socialists and bureaucrats and Marxists and globalists and collectivists have been able to infiltrate government, politics, society, education, culture and sway Americans from a norm of thinking for self, providing for self, protecting for self — i.e., taking care of one’s own health — into the utterly anti-American, anti-constitutional, anti-individualistic realm of blindly accepting, blindly obeying, silently accepting and obeying all that government commands.
The peril of this morphing is momentous.
These SCOTUS case considerations aren’t simply about vaccinations.
They are about laws versus orders, individualism versus collectivism, God-given rights versus government powers.
They are about the fate of citizen liberties in America, both now and forever after.
And that a few good and maybe not so good men and women get to chart the course of freedom for all of America and for perpetuity is not just unsettling. It’s horrific.
If the court slaps back Biden on both counts, it’ll be a good day for America. But not as great as if these cases were laughed out of lower courts in the first place. Not as great as if Biden and his band of merry COVID-19-tied tyrants had been laughed off their tracks of tyranny in the first place.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley. Listen to her podcast “Bold and Blunt” by clicking HERE. And never miss her column; subscribe to her newsletter by clicking HERE. Her latest book, “Socialists Don’t Sleep: Christians Must Rise Or America Will Fall,” is available by clicking HERE.
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For more information, visit The Washington Times COVID-19 resource page.
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