Supreme Court to Hear Challenge to Two Biden Vaccine Mandates January 7

The Supreme Court announced late Wednesday that it will hear oral arguments in appeals against two of President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandates January 7. One mandate involves large employers, and the other involves healthcare workers.

As the SCOTUSblog noted earlier this week:

On Friday night, within hours of a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit that reinstated the Biden administration’s vaccine-or-test mandate for large employers, several of the plaintiffs challenging the rule came to the court, asking the justices to stay the 6th Circuit’s ruling while their appeals proceed. Also pending before the justices is an emergency request from the administration to lift lower-court rulings that have blocked a vaccine mandate for workers at health care facilities that receive federal funding.

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The applications asking the justices to put the Biden administration’s test-or-vaccine mandate on hold came to the court just one day after the Biden administration sought emergency relief at the court regarding a different vaccine mandate. On Thursday, the federal government asked the justices to allow it to temporarily enforce a vaccine mandate, with religious and medical exemptions, for health-care workers at facilities that participate in the Medicare and Medicaid programs. Lower-court rulings have blocked the administration from enforcing that mandate in about half the states. The justices ordered the challengers in those cases to respond by the afternoon of Dec. 30.

The Biden administration has lost several times in the federal courts, over arguments that it lacks the authority to impose mandates on the country. Despite the litigation, the administration has encouraged employers to enforce mandates regardless.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.