The Supreme Court’s recent decision to block the Biden administration’s vaccination-or-test requirement for large private businesses will threaten the safety of hundreds of thousands of workers. But the damage it could do goes well beyond the pandemic.
The court’s 6-3 majority acknowledged that the order would save more than 6,500 lives and prevent more than 250,000 hospitalizations — but went ahead and blocked it anyway. There is probably no other court in the world that would stop its national government from taking such commonsense emergency measures to protect workers from the life-threatening risks of COVID--19. On Friday, a federal judge, relying on the Supreme Court’s decision, went still further, ruling that the president could not even require the federal government’s own employees to be vaccinated, despite a statute giving him broad authority to regulate employment policy for all federal workers.
Even more worrisome, though, is what the court’s reasoning means for our ability to address national challenges going forward. The majority stopped the order based on a wildly anachronistic vision of how the federal government should operate — one that would require Congress itself, rather than federal agencies, to micromanage complex problems.
