How Will Biden’s Federal Edicts Fare in Court?

CLAY: How are federal vaccine mandates from Joe Biden going to play out in confrontation and conflict with the opposite in opposition to a covid vaccine mandate which is being implemented, for instance, in states like Texas by Greg Abbott? The general rule — and I’ll say this, by the way. They tell you when you graduate from law school that you could say…

I remember they said this at my graduation about 20 years ago. The speaker, the dean of the law school said, “Three years ago, when someone asked you a legal question, you could throw up your hands and say, ‘I have no idea,'” and he said, “And now, after spending three years studying the law and diving into all of the complexities and becoming a learned legal scholar…

“Somebody can ask you a question about the law and after three years of legal education, you can say, ‘That depends,'” which is one of the things that drives people crazy about lawyers is it’s really about analyzing probabilities as it pertains to judges, as it pertains to cases. So the general rule here is, federal law would supersede state law, right? In general.

Unless the power has specifically been restricted to the states. We do not have a great deal of legal history as it pertains to mandatory vaccines from the federal government. My general rule here is I do not believe Joe Biden has the constitutional authority to mandate vaccines as expansively as he is attempting to do, okay? I don’t think he has that ability.

And the conspiracy theorist in me, as we said earlier, Buck, is saying the reason why we still haven’t seen these OSHA regulations is because the Biden administration knows that and they’re trying to drag this out as long as possible and get companies and CEOs to start to implement their vaccine mandates before they get struck down by the courts.

BUCK: Because right now, what you saw in New York, for example, was in advance of mandate compliance from a lot of people, and clearly the more they can get that from the companies with over a hundred employees, the happier they’re gonna be because they’ve obviously added to their vaccinated numbers, there’s more momentum behind the program.

They get to this point where they start to say, “Oh, look! Look how well it’s working already, and we didn’t even have to start fining companies” whatever it is, 15,000 or 30,000 or huge amounts of money if you don’t comply with this OSHA regulation that comes forward. It’s also just a reminder. We’ve talked in the past about government overreach, and I refer to the many-headed hydra of D.C. statism, right.

D.C. deciding that it’s going to be the authoritarian body for the rest of the country. Look at what we have been put through over the course of covid. We have had the CDC think that it can tell people, “Oh, the contract that you have and the state law that governs it when it comes to your home that you own and your ability to have contracts enforced and kick people out if they don’t pay the rent?

“We’re just gonna abrogate that because we’re the CDC,” right? You have so many of these government bodies that have been coming out with guidance regulation, mandates, dictates, and now you’re gonna have OSHA coming along and saying, “If you don’t make every employee get a shot, we’re going to bankrupt you”?

That’s the kind of stuff, Clay, that worries people when they see the government acting in that way, and then when you add on top of it, they want to spend trillions of dollars additionally the reconciliation package. Can we remind everybody of this Pelosi thing? Are you down to tell everybody about this one?

CLAY: Yeah. Let me just quickly say, I think what we’re gonna end up is a conflict in circuit that’s going to take a long time to play out. There are a lot of different circuit courts out there. Some will say one thing. Others will say another. And ultimately, the Supreme Court may well weigh in. The problem is, by the time many of these cases get to high-level courts to make determinations, covid’s gonna be over.

BUCK: Moot. That’s the point.

CLAY: So I think it’s gonna be very moot in terms of where the courts end up weighing in, which is what I think the Biden administration is relying on, just like with the covid vaccine moratorium.