BIDEN ‘SHOT’ DOWN

Supremes nix biz rule

In a big setback for the Biden administration, the Supreme Court stopped it on Thursday from enforcing a requirement that employees at large businesses be vaccinated against COVID-19 or undergo weekly testing.

In a concurrent decision, the court allowed vaccine mandates on most healthcare workers to stand.

The decisions, which were passed in 6-3 and 5-4 votes, respectively, were handed down six days after the justices heard arguments in both cases and come amid a surge in COVID-19 cases.

The first case dealt with the vaccine-or-test mandate from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration targeting businesses of 100 employees or more.

Overstepping

The court’s conservative majority concluded that the Biden administration had overstepped its authority with the rule, which would have affected more than 80 million people.

“OSHA has never before imposed such a mandate. Nor has Congress. Indeed, although Congress has enacted significant legislation addressing the COVID–19 pandemic, it has declined to enact any measure similar to what OSHA has promulgated here,” the justices wrote in an unsigned opinion.

In a joint dissent, the court’s three liberals — Justices Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor — argued that the court was substituting its judgment for that of health experts.

“Acting outside of its competence and without legal basis, the court displaces the judgments of the government officials given the responsibility to respond to workplace health emergencies,” they wrote.

First introduced by President Biden last fall, the OSHA rule was criticized by the GOP. The White House argued it was key to getting Americans vaccinated.

Local fallout

The ruling won’t be binding on challenges to similar state and city rules but may help persuade local judges to rule the same way.

Attorney James Mermigis of Syosset, LI — who recently filed a suit to add a religious exemption to Gov. Hochul’s vaccination requirement for health care workers — hailed the high court’s decision.

But, Mermigis said, “Mayors and governors have police powers, meaning they could make these kinds of orders because they can say they are protecting the public.”

Staten Island lawyer Mark Fonte — whose firm, Fonte and Gelormino, has suits pending against former Mayor Bill de Blasio’s vaccine mandates for school workers and businesses — said he wasn’t sure whether the ruling would “have a positive impact” on those cases.

But he said he planned to use the decision to “argue that if an agency’s powers are expanded, there has to be a limit to that.”

In a statement, President Biden said he was “disappointed” in the decision to “block common-sense lifesaving requirements for employees at large businesses that were grounded squarely in both science and the law.”