The 5th Circuit Court of Appeals has blocked Democrat President Joe Biden’s coronavirus vaccine mandate in a ruling late on Friday, calling it “staggeringly overbroad.”
The three-judge panel in New Orleans ruled that Biden’s mandate “grossly exceeds OSHA’s statutory authority,” writing that “rather than a delicately handled scalpel, the Mandate is a one-size fits-all sledgehammer that makes hardly any attempt to account for differences in workplaces (and workers) that have more than a little bearing on workers’ varying degrees of susceptibility to the supposedly ‘grave danger’ the Mandate purports to address.”
Judges Kurt D. Engelhardt, Edith H. Jones, and Stuart Kyle Duncan said that the mandate imposed financial burdens on businesses that could potentially violate the Constitution, writing, “The Mandate imposes a financial burden upon them by deputizing their participation in OSHA’s regulatory scheme, exposes them to severe financial risk if they refuse or fail to comply, and threatens to decimate their workforces (and business prospects) by forcing unwilling employees to take their shots, take their tests, or hit the road.”
The court stayed the mandate in a ruling last Saturday, writing that there were potentially “grave statutory and constitutional issues with the Mandate.”
White House Deputy Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre responded the ruling on Monday by saying that the Biden administration’s message to businesses that fall under the mandate is that they “should not wait” to implement the measure.