NASHVILLE, Tenn. – Alliance Defending Freedom and the Dhillon Law Group, Inc., on behalf of The Daily Wire, filed a legal challenge Thursday in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit to the Biden administration’s vaccine mandate.
The mandate requires all private employers of 100 or more employees to force unvaccinated employees to receive a COVID-19 vaccine, be subject to weekly testing and masking requirements, or lose their job. Attorneys for The Daily Wire will also file an emergency motion to stay the mandate.
“The Biden administration’s decision to mandate vaccines through an OSHA emergency rule is unlawful and compels businesses like The Daily Wire to intrude on their employees’ personal health decisions,” said ADF Senior Counsel Ryan Bangert. “The government has no authority to unilaterally treat unvaccinated employees like workplace hazards or to compel employers to become vaccine commissars, and we are asking the 6th Circuit to put a stop to it immediately.”
“The Daily Wire will not comply with President Biden’s tyrannical vaccine mandate, and we are suing the administration to put a stop to their gross overreach,” said Daily Wire Co-Founder and Co-CEO Jeremy Boreing. “President Biden, the federal government, social media, and the establishment media have conspired to rob Americans of their freedoms in the name of public health. They have broken faith with the American people through conflicting messaging, false information, and by suppressing data and perspectives with which they disagree.”
The lawsuit, The Daily Wire v. Occupational Safety and Health Administration, alleges that the Biden administration lacks constitutional and statutory authority to issue the employer mandate, and that the mandate failed to meet the requirements for issuing a rule taking effect immediately without the normal process of considering public comments.
The lawsuit takes no position on any COVID-19 vaccine or whether any person should make the personal decision whether to receive it. The Daily Wire has employees who have received a COVID-19 vaccine and those who have not.
“The federal government lacks the legal authority to compel private employers to play the role of vaccine or COVID police, lacks the police power to force private employees to undergo medical treatment, and may not ignore constitutional limits on its ability to regulate every aspect of our lives,” said Dhillon Law Group partner Harmeet K. Dhillon. “The Biden administration’s attempt to impose this unprecedented and unlawful federal medical mandate on the U.S. workforce without considering the public’s views is arbitrary, capricious, unsupported by the evidence, and would produce a willfully ignorant rule.”
As the motion for stay to be filed with the 6th Circuit will argue, the federal government has no power under the Constitution to force half the U.S. private sector workforce—80 million workers or more—to be vaccinated against their will or endure repeated medical testing as a condition of simply earning a living. Nor is OSHA empowered to compel employers to enforce this government diktat or face punishing fines. Yet the OSHA mandate would do just that. Even if it had such power, Congress did not delegate it to OSHA, which is overtly trying to ram this unconstitutional, extra-statutory, and unprecedented mandate into immediate effect through emergency rulemaking to avoid public comment in violation of the Administrative Procedure Act.
Forced to invade employees’ medical choices or histories and their religious beliefs in connection with a condition of employment, The Daily Wire risks being trapped between its obligations under the mandate and the prohibitions against discrimination under the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, as well as the burdens of laws regulating the possession of private information. The mandate is unconstitutional because the Constitution does not grant Congress—much less OSHA—the general police powers needed to mandate vaccination and virus testing as a condition of private employment, or to deputize employers to enforce that mandate on its behalf.
Alliance Defending Freedom is an alliance-building, non-profit legal organization committed to protecting religious freedom, free speech, parental rights, and the sanctity of life.
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