WASHINGTON – The Senate granted Sen. Ted Cruz’s demand Thursday night for a vote to block local school boards from requiring COVID-19 vaccines but then promptly rejected his proposal.
Cruz and a handful of Republican allies had threatened to force a government shutdown if they didn’t get floor votes aimed at ending vaccine mandates.
Cruz’s proposal to cut off federal funds for school districts failed on a vote of 44 in favor, 49 against, after a brief debate that saw Democrats and Republicans swap their traditional stances on the extent of federal power to overrule local government, particularly during a public health crisis.
Democrats warned that Cruz was trying to strip control from locally elected school boards.
The Texan urged colleagues to do precisely that, because those that impose vaccine mandates are “trampling on our rights.”
“These petty tyrants have no right to force parents to vaccinate children with a new and untested vaccine,” Cruz argued. “And let me be clear, I’m vaccinated. I’m pro-vaccine, but I believe in individual choice. If you want to be vaccinated, fantastic. But it ought to be your choice in consultation with your doctor.”
Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., accused Cruz of attempting a “massive federal overreach that would disempower school boards and states and take funding away from their children’s education.”
Kaine noted that student vaccine mandates are hardly novel, and said it would be “unprecedented” for Congress to “force local school boards and state superintendents of instruction to not have a vaccine mandate.”
“Everyone in this body [the Senate] who attended school in the United States had to get vaccines to attend school,” he said. “Measles, mumps, rubella, polio, chickenpox. Everyone in his body who has sent a child to school in the United States had to make sure that they got their children vaccinated. And is that because of a big federal mandate? No. All 51 states – Utah, Texas, New York, Maine, Washington, Rhode Island, Wisconsin, Virginia – embrace their own vaccine mandates. All 51.”
Sen. Mike Lee, R-Utah, offered an amendment similar to Cruz’s, to block the vaccine mandate President Joe Biden ordered for the federal workforce, including those in uniform.
That got slightly more support but still failed, on a party line 46-47 vote.
Two Republicans voted against the Cruz amendment.
Lee insisted that with the pandemic ebbing, “we’re ready to move on. We’re ready to not have government dictating every aspect of our lives. COVID is no excuse for a government to do something that is categorically immoral.”
The votes on those amendments cleared a path for the Senate to approve a must-pass three-week budget extension, averting a shutdown that would have begun at midnight Friday. The House approved that three-week deal on Feb. 8.
The Senate vote Thursday night was 65-27 to keep the government funded through March 11.
Lawmakers are close to finalizing a massive annual budget topping $1 trillion, and leaders in both parties agreed to the short-term funding to buy a bit more time.
Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., denounced Cruz, Lee and their allies for threatening a shutdown “in the middle of a pandemic” – an idea so bad “it should be obvious.”
Alas, she said, “my colleagues are here once again, pretending the biggest threat to our nation is not the virus but instead it’s vaccines and tests and masks that have helped actually save lives. This makes about as much sense as blaming the rescue crew for a shipwreck and threatening to sink that lifeboat unless they don’t stop helping.”
Cruz often flies United Airlines between the capital and Houston, and said that every time, a pilot or flight attendant thanks him for fighting against corporate and government vaccine mandates.
“We’re seeing airline flights canceled all over the country. And yet, under these illegal vaccine mandates, airline pilots and flight attendants and mechanics and ticket agents are being fired from their jobs,” he said.
He called out United for an “arbitrary policy” adopted to “curry favor with the Biden White House because United has a CEO [Scott Kirby] who believes making Democrats on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue happy is somehow in his best interest.”
As for the school mandates, he said, “That is an absolute abuse of power. The choice of the health care your kid get ought to be the choice of the parents. ... But we’re seeing arrogant blue state Democrats across the country say to moms and dads `I don’t care what your views are.’”
The U.S. Supreme Court struck down the Biden administration’s effort to invoke workplace safety laws to require vaccines in the private sector. But millions of federal workers must get vaccinated or get regular testing for COVID-19.
“Under this vaccine mandate, Democrats are firing doctors and nurses and then complaining that we have a shortage of doctors and nurses,” Cruz asserted. “Under President Biden’s illegal vaccine mandates this administration is preparing to fire soldiers and sailors and airmen and Marines [and ...] Navy SEALs who spent decades training and fighting to defend this nation. ... because they will not submit to an arbitrary and illegal mandate.”
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