In the year since the landmark ruling, businesses around the nation dropped their vaccine mandates in a win for liberty and the rule of law. Yet the fight didn’t start in January of last year, it actually began months earlier.
On November 4, 2021, the Biden administration announced that companies with 100 or more employees would be required to subject their workers to a vaccine-or-test mandate, a draconian policy set to be enforced through the Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). As soon as President Joe Biden imposed the “blatantly unconstitutional” requirement, The Daily Wire decided to fight it all the way to SCOTUS if necessary.
Teaming up with attorney Harmeet K. Dhillon of the Dhillon Law Group and the Alliance Defending Freedom, The Daily Wire became the first major company to file a lawsuit against the emergency mandate in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit. As Jeremy Boreing, co-CEO and god-king of The Daily Wire explained, the mandate was “not just wrong” but illegal.
“The constitution simply doesn’t grant the federal government the power to insert itself into employment relationships this way,” Boreing said. “And even if it did, Congress certainly never delegated that power to OSHA.”
Other businesses and groups around the nation soon also filed lawsuits, and the case was consolidated into National Federation of Independent Business v. Department of Labor.
In a 6-3 decision along ideological lines, SCOTUS also agreed with The Daily Wire and its allies.
Shortly after, major employers such as Starbucks, Intel, Adidas, and more dropped their mandates.
Many companies cited the high court’s decision as the primary reason for dropping the case.
“Due to court decisions last month, Intel currently is not subject to a vaccine mandate or weekly testing requirements for unvaccinated employees — and it is not requiring either for its employees at the moment,” an Intel spokesperson told CBS News in March 2022. Many other corporations made similar comments.
By August 2022, surveys showed that 56% of all American companies were dropping vaccine mandates for their employers.
In short, the SCOTUS ruling made possible by subscribers and supporters of The Daily Wire sparked a wave of freedom.
As Boreing commented during the litigation process, CEOs should not be dictating important medical decisions to their employees. Religious, personal, and medical reasons may all factor into an American’s decision to get the jab or not, yet the federal government’s politically driven rule took none of that into account, according to Boreing.
“Instead, the administration tried to fit a square peg into a round hole, by applying this broad expansive one size fits all mandate to a randomly selected portion of the American workforce,” Boreing said.
By Jan. 25, 2022, the Biden administration announced that it would be dropping the private sector vaccine mandate altogether. Just recently, the Biden administration agreed to drop the mandate requiring members of America’s armed forces to get the vaccine after conservatives and Republicans pushed back.
Had it not been for those companies who fought the federal government in court, the mandate would likely be in place. Now, future administrations that exceed their constitutional authority, as the Biden administration did, can be held in check thanks to the precedent set in the National Federation of Independent Business v. Department of Labor ruling.
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