BUCK: The biggest story by far we have is the Biden administration rolling out more specifically — we knew for a while that they were going to do this, but now we have the actual 490 pages or so of — the OSHA regulation that has been unveiled here. Here’s just the latest of it. Then we gotta break this down for you. You have the Biden administration setting January 4th for all companies with a certain number of employees to make sure their workforces are fully vaccinated.
This will affect about 84 million private sector workers. This was announced, as you remember, back in September. Businesses with over a hundred employees or a hundred or more are mandated to get vaccinations for all employees or workers who refuse must undergo weekly testing. That’s the situation as it stands right now. Clay, we have been warning about this. We’ve known it was coming. Now we see how this is actually gonna be implemented.
And I think we should ask a lot of questions. We should push back a lot on this madness. One is, what exactly are we told this is supposed to accomplish, given that the virus is mutating rapidly? These vaccines are highly imperfect, to say the least, in terms of their protection. They only last a matter of months. Isn’t this setting up a permanent cycle of vaccination if we were to comply even this first time around, which I know a lot of people aren’t going to?
CLAY: Yeah. There are so many big legal questions being asked here, and we’ve been, I think, of anybody out in the media the most anti-vaccine mandate of anyone that has an audience certainly approaching the one that we do. And just so sort of reinforce for everybody out there, you had to get a vaccine in order to attend your brother’s wedding in New York.
But you had held out, ’cause you had covid already and you had natural immunity. I’ve had covid. I have not been vaccinated yet because I have natural immunity, and so we have fought aggressively for natural immunity to be factored in in some way as it pertains to vaccine mandates and also obviously been fighting against vaccine mandates themselves.
But I think there are several things worth taking note of here. First of all, they released this two days after Election Day. If you want to know how political this is, the Biden administration, which announced this in September, held off on publicly stating this until two days after Election Day because I think they knew that vaccine mandates were going to be wildly unpopular with many people out there, not just Republicans, by the way.
A lot of people are pro-vaccine but anti-vaccine mandate and anti-requiring people. And, in fact, that was the position the Biden administration adopted for months until they flip-flopped on this issue and suddenly said, “No, we’re gonna mandate it.” The other thing that I think is going to be massive here is January 4th is the start date effectively where this rule goes into effect.
This is where, I believe, the Supreme Court needs to step up and say — the answer is “no” — does the federal government have the authority under OSHA to mandate this vaccine? And again, this is important, Buck, because I’m putting my lawyer hat on here. The authority under OSHA, they are using an administrative agency’s powers expansively in the same way that they tried to do with the CDC and the eviction ban.
The Supreme court said, “No, no, no, no. You can’t use as a to get an eviction ban. You would need to take this to the legislature,” right? I don’t think there’s any doubt Joe Biden’s not gonna be asked about this because most of the media is complicit in spreading and endorsing this idea. But if this were trying to go in front of the House or Senate and if they were saying, “Hey, can we have a federal vaccine mandate that we pass through the House or Senate,” here’s no way it passes, right?
Not any way possible. So Joe Biden’s trying to use an executive agency, OSHA, that’s never been used in this manner before — an administrative agency — in order to implement a federal vaccine mandate, and I don’t believe it’s going to be applied. Now, the other wrinkle here, Buck — and I spent a lot of time thinking about this and reading about it as soon as it came out this morning — how does the weekly testing factor in? Who’s going to pay for it? And is that going to somehow… That’s not technically a vaccine mandate, right? You can continue to get weekly testing.
BUCK: That’s what they’re saying. Yeah.
CLAY: And so I wonder how that’s going to be implemented by courts of law because it’s not technically a vaccine mandate. There is weekly testing. But that can be very expensive. How is that going to be handled? These are all big questions that a lot of companies are going to be grappling with.
BUCK: I also think at some level, yes, they delayed this. But isn’t it fascinating as well that the Biden administration rolling this out with this specificity comes at a time when we were asking the question just on this show yesterday are they going to moderate or double down? And for anyone who’s wondering, the answer is on a lot of this stuff they’re going to double down.
They are angry, and understand this: The Democrats view the voters of Virginia who came out — including the suburban moms who are the difference makers who decided they’d had enough of the craziness in the schools. They came out. They had voted for Biden, they had voted for Obama, they had voted for Hillary, and they changed their minds because of bad decisions and bad outcomes the Democrats enforced on them.
They’ll talk about how, “Oh, maybe we need to moderate our wokeness a little bit.” No. They actually just think the problem here is there hasn’t been enough of the mandates. They haven’t gotten enough of their way. So I already see this as just part and parcel of them going with the double-down approach to represent what we’re seeing and that’s why it’s also a moment where for everybody — and I’ve been saying this.
Clay, this goes back to even before you and I teamed up here for this fantastic radio show. Everybody was telling me, “Don’t think you’re safe from the Fauciite madness because you’re in a blue state.” Now everyone’s seeing yet another level of this. You’re bringing up the constitutional issue. I’m not… You haven’t said one way or another. You believe it’s unconstitutional. I believe it’s unconstitutional.
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: Do we really think there are five Supreme Court justices who will step up and do…? Clay, I think to say it’s a 50-50 proposition is kind of obvious in a sense, right? But I think it could go either way. You’ve seen some of the vaccine mandates stuff already that’s gone off on the Supreme Court level just recently believe, and I think was 6-3 in favor of the mandate at least in one instance where they were trying to get a delay.
So I’m not confident in this, and that’s a reminder for everybody that what they want to be in D.C. if you’re listening to us right now you live in Texas or Florida or Montana or South Dakota or wherever, even if you’re a red state and you feel like you’re safe, Clay, Fauciism comes for you wherever you are.
CLAY: Well, and remember, the other element of this — and you could do, by the way, we got some young people out there who are interested one day in going to law school or some older people who gave me like, “Hey, I don’t love my current job; I’m interested in law school.” This is a law school hypothetical on many levels. There will be entire law school courses taught on the covid era and the law that emerges.
Remember, the law typical follows significantly behind the reality. Examine the conflict here that is the most pronounced is not individual against government. It’s arguably government against government because as you rightly point out, we have got a lot of red states that are implementing the exact opposite rule that the federal government is trying to implement.
BUCK: And this where plenary powers I think are so important because we established at the beginning of this pandemic, right, Clay, that the states in some cases — unfortunately, like a place like New York where they’re sending peopling into nursing homes with covid and making bad decisions. But states have a lot of authority under quarantine and under health emergencies to manage for their residents the people there. Well, when did the federal government all of a sudden get that power too? So that’s where I think we see there may be an even stronger… It may be more so that they can’t just override the states. That’s where you see this is federal overreach, right? That’s where I think we’re going.
CLAY: And ironically here… Remember, everybody on “the resistance” was convinced that Donald Trump was an awful dictator. He actually allowed a lot of individual state and city powers during the course of covid. He wasn’t overruling Andrew Cuomo. He was trying to support him. He wasn’t overruling Gavin Newsom, by and large. He was trying to support him.
And so the irony here is Joe Biden has come in and ended up with the expansionist narrative — what supposedly liberals were afraid of — which was, “Donald Trump is a dictator!” Now Joe Biden is coming in and trying to use federal supremacy to override state federalism, which is a massive constitutional battle on so many fronts as well.
CLAY: Yes. That’s right.
BUCK: So they essentially get their way almost everywhere almost all the time, and then when there’s a Democrat administration, it doesn’t even matter that there are red states anymore that want to take a different approach. It doesn’t matter that there’s Florida or Texas. They’re forcing a showdown of this, and it is, I think, gonna go up to the Supreme Court and we have to do…
My other problem with this, Clay, is they’re not gonna talk about this, and we should come back and get into the next step. What do they do here? They’re getting hospitals to go along with it by threatening Medicare and Medicaid funding. That’s happening at the federal government level. What’s another big federal agency where a lot of federal dollars that go into even red states, even places where you think you’re safe from this? Education dollars.
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: They’re going to try to mandate this for kids. If covid continues to have the caseload that it does throughout this winter, if it gets worse, they’re gonna try a mandate — a federal mandate — for children based on Department of Education pressure. I think that’s the ultimate move, that’s the final, but I think they might get there.
CLAY: And I was just gonna say, Buck, if you think the mask battle has been significant, what I’ve been saying is that’s a water gunfight compared to what happens when somebody tries to mandate covid vaccines for kids. And again, the positive on this, Buck, is I think it could take… We need to keep talking about the legalities here and how it’s gonna play out as you kind of look at all these different angles.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
CLAY: Big wins on Tuesday. Big battles coming on Thursday. We told you this was not over as Joe Biden officially doubles down on what I would say is a far left-wing agenda — and, Buck, we should also point out that this story is going to give some cover to the Build Back Better initiative, which is potentially going to be voted on in the House today. So Nancy Pelosi. We asked how Democrats would respond.
At least in the House, they’ve responded by expanding the Bernie budget that has been whittled down because of Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema, and most of the attention… I really do think that most of the attention is going to be on this vaccine mandate, which doesn’t go into effect until January 4th. And, meanwhile, up on Capitol Hill, they may be stealthily advancing the biggest expansion of the federal government since the 1960s.
Now, maybe Manchin and Sinema are gonna stand athwart the passage in the Senate under the reconciliation bill. But there’s a lot going on all of a sudden and I think on some level that feels like it may well be by design, sort of just throw so much out there that the news is difficult keeping up with.
BUCK: Clay, can I say, it’s like the Democrats are driving around in their parents’ SUV, and they’ve knocked over a bunch of mailboxes taking turns, and they’re like, “You know what we should do? Go faster!”
CLAY: Yes. It is kind of wild to find ourselves here, and the other aspect of this is timing. So this goes into affect on January 4th. Presumably there will be massive numbers of lawsuits being filed all over the country both by companies that don’t want to comply with the mandate. I believe, to their credit, The Daily Wire has already announced, “Hey, we’re not going to comply,” and they’re filing a lawsuit. But also, by states, and so the procedural posture here, Buck, is going to get really complicated for ultimately state supreme courtrs, and also where this would have to be resolved, the federal Supreme Court, and how long will it take?
BUCK: The Democrats established — and everyone should remember this because this is essential. They established repeatedly during the Trump administration — and when I say Democrats, I mean Democrats in black robes on judge’s benches, federal judges — universal injunctions. You could have one judge here come up with a universal injunction at the federal level to say, “Sorry. Can’t implement this vaccine mandate as it’s set forth.”
They’re giving some time, I think, to allow the legal battles to play out of it because they’re trying to avoid it. They’re trying to hope that more and more companies just keep getting people vaccinated. But remember, if there’s no stay on this, once it goes into effect and once someone’s gotten the shot, they’ve gotten the shot, right? So it doesn’t matter if the process drags out too long, too far. For a lot of people, they’re not gonna have the chance to see where this goes.
CLAY: Yeah, no doubt.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
BUCK: Clay, here is Joe Biden yesterday talking about this. I found this… I actually think people have lost their minds, and I think Joe Biden at some level is one of them. And I don’t just mean because of the old-age thing. I’m talking about he just has bought into this at some level, because this sounds crazy to me. Let’s play it and we’ll react to it.
BIDEN: After months of rigorous and independent scientific review the Food and Drug Administration, the FDA, authorized and the Centers for Disease Control, the CDC, recommended the covid-19 vaccine for children ages 5 through 11. For parents all of this, this is a day of relief and celebration. After almost 18 months of anxious worrying every time the children — child has a sniffle or started to cough. Well, you can now protect them from this horrible virus.
CLAY: Yes.
BUCK: He is pandering to people with an anxiety disorder that the Democrats created. You and I both know children, Clay, what level of risk?
CLAY: Virtually zero, and I just want to keep hammering this home because at some point a lot of you out there listening can share a segment from the show and say, “Hey, just go listen to these guys. They’re not gonna try to terrify you. They’re just gonna give you the facts.” Your kid right now is under more danger of drowning, dying in a car accident, being murdered, of the seasonal flu than they are from covid.
So if you’ve been sitting around for 18 months terrified of what might happen to your kids, then you are buying into what I call the media fear porn industry because it is in no way a rational reflection of what parents should be concerned about. I’ve got three young kids. They matter more to me than anything in the world. I understand how easy it is to scare parents because by nature all of us, dads and moms, are fearful.
But I think what you saw in Virginia and what you are seeing nationwide is the mom revolution is, a lot of moms know — they know — that they’re being lied to now. They’ve had time to do their own research. One thing we know, moms all get together and talk, and that’s why I think sharing real data matters. Buck, on Tuesday night I went and spoke to a big mom group here in Williamson County.
Hundreds of moms there. They are all taking up arms against this ridiculousness, and the challenge that the Democrats have is, it’s a little like the boy who cried wolf. It’s harder and harder to scream that kids are under danger from covid when the data continues to reflect it isn’t true.
BUCK: If we had a real press corps in this country… There are some real journalists. We do not have a real press corps. If we did, they would ask the president next time they were able to give him questions, “Sir, you say that parents should feel relief and celebration that 5- to 11-year-olds can get this vaccine. Just so everyone’s on the same page and we’re looking at the data and we’re looking at this honestly, what is the percentage of mortality?
“What is the risk for children 5 to 11, sir?” The CDC has that data, and he should have to tell the American people, “Well, it’s about one ma million” and then look at them and repeat his idiocy about relief and celebration. If you’re worried a one-in-a-million chance, don’t ever leave your house for anything. Just sit there like some kind of a fungus on a log. Don’t go anywhere. That’s reality, and the Biden administration will not let people know that truth, will not say that truth because they’re appalling.
The origin of how Buck got Seh-kwan Barkley and George Pickles.
Watch Clay and Buck analyze how the liberal media is scrambling.
In this limited edition podcast, Clay and Buck get you ready for Thanksgiving with your…
Berenson on the RFK Jr. nomination and whether he'd sign up to join him in…
Another day, another Trump cabinet choice that's making Washington heads explode.
When and how did Democrats become the party of conspiracy crackpots?