Same Constitution, different laws. The dissent acknowledged that, although I agree overall with the dissents concerns. The cases had to do with whether a stay was called for, not whether vax mandates are constitutional. That issue hasn't been raised in front of any court that I'm aware of yet, although there are religious exemption cases in the pipeline. There are also two cases this term before the SCOTUS that challenge the existing constitutional basis of administrative agency regulation making.
Wouldn't it be great if the Court when deciding cases where federal regulations are at issue they first went through the following simple logic:
1) Is the regulation based on specific rule making authority granted by statute? If no the regulation is void, if yes go to 2.
2) Is the statute based on an enumerated power found in the constitution? If no the statute is void, if yes go to 3.
3) Does the statute violate amendment 10? If yes the statute is void, if no the regulation is allowed to be enforced . . . absent other reasons to throw out the regulation.
Sidney, please tell me that once I'm president (tee hee) you'll accept a nomination by me to the Supreme Court. It'll be a better place with you in it.
Well, I was just now able to read the opinions in the HHS case, and the two dissents were just what I feared. (The majority opinion was the usual one-sided-argument drivel you'd expect from that lot, failing even to consider that those who object to the jabs might even *possess* a medically-based civil rights argument, let alone actually *addressing* it.) I'm a big fan of both Thomas and Alito and not afraid to say as much. And I have no issue with the points they gave. The problem is the arguments they didn't give, and it points to an issue that has long concerned me.
That concern is as follows: there are generally three principal types of high-IQ people, and I think of them as the verbies, the mathies and the ambies. The verbies are exceptionally strong in verbal reasoning but weak in STEM reasoning, the mathies are exceptionally strong in STEM reasoning but weak in verbal reasoning, and the ambies are strong, though perhaps not off-the-charts strong, in both.
We need a leadership class -very much including the judicial class- that has a good mix of all three of these, yet both are dominated by the verbies, and the Court is something like 8-0-1 on this front (Sotomayor is the "1" - strong in nothing). No self-respecting mathie or ambie could possibly have failed to master the science behind this issue, which would then put such a person in a very strong position to argue forcefully and effectively that whatever the laws and regulations may say, the facts scream from the top of the highest mountain that this mandate will NOT prevent the disease spread it claims but WILL cause some unknown but very high degree of biological damage to the forcefully vaccinated class as a whole.
This same mathie or ambie, were he on the Court, would also have a thorough command of the proven-effective methods of covid prevention and spread that are clearly spelled out and scientifically supported by the combined works of the likes of the FLCCC, Dr. David Brownstein and many others of their ilk. And he would have demanded the Court and the Parties address this STEM side of the issue head-on as well as stressed the principal that the government is supposed to regulate things in the least harmful or intrusive way available.
Compared to those who would forcefully be given the jab, hospital staff who simply participated in the combined prevention protocols of the two parties mentioned above, including regular sessions of peroxide-iodine nebulization (or even just the povidone-iodine nasal rinse + Listerine oral rinses), would be orders of magnitude less likely to contract and spread covid or any other respiratory disease, and this has been conclusively demonstrated by the totality of the available evidence. And there would be not one single sort of negative health effect of any of this.
Even if making this argument somehow failed to convince five or more Justices, at least it would be in the public sphere, and this alone would be hugely consequential. The reason no such argument got made isn't that the Justices are all low-IQ - most of them are very much not. It's that they're all pure verbies and have a strong natural aversion to the STEM-side of issues. They don't understand that side, so they treat it like it doesn't even exist.
I don't think this is anything like a small problem -not in the Court nor in our "leadership" class in general- and I'll just leave it at that.
(Just for a bit of reference, here’s some of David Brownstein’s work:
The US Supreme Court just guaranteed staff shortages in American hospitals for the foreseeable future. The vax does not halt transmission, so no marginal benefit to patients regarding covid risk either.
Not only that, rural health care is going to be devastated. There was plenty of warning about this. I am not smart enough to postulate how practical considerations should inform judicial decisions vs. legal ones. But it seems to me that the real world effect (negative or positive) should imply some logic that the court needs to consider before rendering decisions.
I saw somewhere else today that one workaround for facilities that don’t want to lose workers can employ might be to grant lots of exemptions. Not sure if that will work but it’s worth looking at I suppose. Otherwise, there’s going to be a cascading collapse of parts of the healthcare system I bet based on comments from Denninger earlier.
MikeyinFL, the CMS rule does provide for medical or religious exemptions. The basis for medical exemptions appears to be limited to a history of allergic reactions (i.e., anaphylaxis) to shot ingredients. There are no exemptions based on medical history otherwise (for example: heart conditions, history of thrombosis or stroke, autoimmune disease, or neurological issues).
The employer is responsible for determining and documenting the legitimacy of religious exemption requests. I have a cousin who is a nurse and was recently hired; he made it clear he would not work without his religious exemption being in force. The employer was amenable to that. I suspect many employers will be willing to grant religious exemptions (as you note) to keep their facilities open. The old saying that "There are no atheists in foxholes" may now become "There are no atheists in rural clinics."
That does sound promising. The ruling today re OSHA may provide encouragement in that direction. Why should healthcare suffer when other industries don't have to, and there's a "workaround"?
That was my thought exactly. If these knuckleheads can finally see the error of their way then perhaps they will become less authoritarian in an effort to avoid financial insolvency. If not, as Denninger would say ___ them.
Knuckleheads is too kind. Craven cowards and murderers maybe. There is a gigantic problem opening up and if you ask me it's intentionally being caused by the criminals at the top, pushing the vaxx is destroying the hospital industry entire.
From the dissent of Justice Thomas: “Yet here, the Government proposes to find virtually unlimited vaccination power, over millions of healthcare workers, in definitional provisions, a saving clause, and a provision regarding long-term care facilities’ sanitation procedures,” - that sure sounds like they can. He continues: "Had Congress wanted to grant CMS power to impose a vaccine mandate across all facility types, it would have done what it has done elsewhere—specifically authorize one.” Yeah, you would think. But apparently all power resides with the CMS once the facilities have accepted the Medicare and Medicaid money.
Oh, and one last point on the HHS decision: what about commandeering of the states? Where is the limit to what the federal government can do via taxing the states and localities to the point where they can't pay for things themselves, then having the federal government pay for these things instead, and then having some lowly, unelected bureaucrat in that same federal government saying, "but we'll only pay for these things if you do what we say"? Not Congress. A solitary, unelected bureacrat.
Maybe this wasn't the best case to deal with this issue, especially since it was ruling only on the stay and not on the merits. And maybe it will be appealed and then granted cert and then maybe the issue will be brought up. But I doubt it, and that's too bad...in my very personal and maybe even lonely opinion.
Kavanaugh's a bust. To me, it's official. No time to go into it now, but I'm confident enough to just state it without evidence for the time being. He was supposedly against the administrative state, but I've seen no evidence of that over his tenure so far.
And neither he nor Barrett could be bothered to join with Gorsuch and Alito to join Thomas' exceedingly modest opinion striking a very modest blow for the major questions and non-delegation doctrines. Without the support of those two, that opinion has no force of precedent. Maybe they just think there will come a better case to assert themselves behind those doctrines, but I have a hard time seeing how supporting them in this instance would have complicated doing so again in some later one.
Okay, fine, the OSHA thing got struck down. But just think how outraged we'd all be if it hadn't. Which is to say, it was an absolute no-brainer even for a squish like Roberts.
Lastly, I won't be able to read the other case's ruling until later, but I'd just throw a couple questions out there: if HHS ruled that all health care workers had to wear a bright pink belt and suspenders to fight covid, would that be equally permissible? Or what if they mandated NO masks could be worn by health care workers - would that too be fine? Perhaps they would be - as I said, I haven't yet read the ruling and so I don't know what the majority decision was based on.
But my obvious point is, can they rule anything they want regardless of the evidentiary basis? If the evidentiary basis matters, then not only did the Court get this wrong, but the lawyers arguing against the mandate screwed up every bit as badly as so many have said in not making the evidentiary case (on grounds both of low efficacy and of high risk) against the mandates in their arguments.
Sorry for the negativity, but then again most here are probably used to it ;^>
These cases came before the Court on the issue of whether the stays should remain--essentially preliminary and procedural matters. There are two admin law cases coming up this term that should be decided on substance.
In the Healthcare case Justice Amy joined the Conservative Three while Roberts and Brett joined the Crazies. That makes it a narrow 5-4 decision. Here's from the concluding paragraph from Alito's dissent:
"Neither CMS nor the Court articulates a limiting principle for why, after an unexplained and unjustified delay, an agency can regulate first and listen later, and then put more than 10 million
healthcare workers to the choice of their jobs or an irreversible medical treatment."
As I have said elsewhere, It seems strange to me, that the Country’s highest court can rule on an issue that seems to be in direct conflict with the Nuremberg resolutions regarding forcing experimental medicine on an unwilling American citizen.
I was hoping that these two issues would have been answered not with a resounding no, but with an unanimous HELL NO. But, I have been disappointed in the past and will be certainly disappointed in the future.
So medical workers are NOT protected under the SAME CONSTITUTION that protects the rest of society from illegal vaccine mandates?
Why is that? Makes no sense.
Same Constitution, different laws. The dissent acknowledged that, although I agree overall with the dissents concerns. The cases had to do with whether a stay was called for, not whether vax mandates are constitutional. That issue hasn't been raised in front of any court that I'm aware of yet, although there are religious exemption cases in the pipeline. There are also two cases this term before the SCOTUS that challenge the existing constitutional basis of administrative agency regulation making.
Wouldn't it be great if the Court when deciding cases where federal regulations are at issue they first went through the following simple logic:
1) Is the regulation based on specific rule making authority granted by statute? If no the regulation is void, if yes go to 2.
2) Is the statute based on an enumerated power found in the constitution? If no the statute is void, if yes go to 3.
3) Does the statute violate amendment 10? If yes the statute is void, if no the regulation is allowed to be enforced . . . absent other reasons to throw out the regulation.
Sidney, please tell me that once I'm president (tee hee) you'll accept a nomination by me to the Supreme Court. It'll be a better place with you in it.
I'll gladly accept your nomination, confirmation would go about as well as Bork's did.
Well, I was just now able to read the opinions in the HHS case, and the two dissents were just what I feared. (The majority opinion was the usual one-sided-argument drivel you'd expect from that lot, failing even to consider that those who object to the jabs might even *possess* a medically-based civil rights argument, let alone actually *addressing* it.) I'm a big fan of both Thomas and Alito and not afraid to say as much. And I have no issue with the points they gave. The problem is the arguments they didn't give, and it points to an issue that has long concerned me.
That concern is as follows: there are generally three principal types of high-IQ people, and I think of them as the verbies, the mathies and the ambies. The verbies are exceptionally strong in verbal reasoning but weak in STEM reasoning, the mathies are exceptionally strong in STEM reasoning but weak in verbal reasoning, and the ambies are strong, though perhaps not off-the-charts strong, in both.
We need a leadership class -very much including the judicial class- that has a good mix of all three of these, yet both are dominated by the verbies, and the Court is something like 8-0-1 on this front (Sotomayor is the "1" - strong in nothing). No self-respecting mathie or ambie could possibly have failed to master the science behind this issue, which would then put such a person in a very strong position to argue forcefully and effectively that whatever the laws and regulations may say, the facts scream from the top of the highest mountain that this mandate will NOT prevent the disease spread it claims but WILL cause some unknown but very high degree of biological damage to the forcefully vaccinated class as a whole.
This same mathie or ambie, were he on the Court, would also have a thorough command of the proven-effective methods of covid prevention and spread that are clearly spelled out and scientifically supported by the combined works of the likes of the FLCCC, Dr. David Brownstein and many others of their ilk. And he would have demanded the Court and the Parties address this STEM side of the issue head-on as well as stressed the principal that the government is supposed to regulate things in the least harmful or intrusive way available.
Compared to those who would forcefully be given the jab, hospital staff who simply participated in the combined prevention protocols of the two parties mentioned above, including regular sessions of peroxide-iodine nebulization (or even just the povidone-iodine nasal rinse + Listerine oral rinses), would be orders of magnitude less likely to contract and spread covid or any other respiratory disease, and this has been conclusively demonstrated by the totality of the available evidence. And there would be not one single sort of negative health effect of any of this.
Even if making this argument somehow failed to convince five or more Justices, at least it would be in the public sphere, and this alone would be hugely consequential. The reason no such argument got made isn't that the Justices are all low-IQ - most of them are very much not. It's that they're all pure verbies and have a strong natural aversion to the STEM-side of issues. They don't understand that side, so they treat it like it doesn't even exist.
I don't think this is anything like a small problem -not in the Court nor in our "leadership" class in general- and I'll just leave it at that.
(Just for a bit of reference, here’s some of David Brownstein’s work:
https://thepowerofozone.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/Dr.-David-Brownstein-Covid.pdf
https://chrismasterjohnphd.com/covid-19/2021/12/01/dr-david-brownstein
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=tCGzXeExccw)
Or, how do they ignore the input to the national conversation of citizen Dr. Zelenko?
Zelenko, exactly. Another fine example. Or the work of George Fareed and Brian Tyson in California? And the list goes on.
https://www.projectveritas.com/news/congressional-members-send-letter-to-cdc-secretaries-of-defense-and-health/
https://assets.ctfassets.net/syq3snmxclc9/1TGiH9xOrRVIeNknhOKGqZ/5cfd3b2f3189e355dfefe7d506d204b6/Rep._Cawthorn_letter__Final_.pdf
https://assets.ctfassets.net/syq3snmxclc9/3rDWaBuwpIneEHuR2MYRTT/7bb2cc26afa4f63562d96067c3dfb572/Ron_Johnson_Letter_01-11-22.pdf
Legal issues aside:
Jay Bhattacharya
@DrJBhattacharya
The US Supreme Court just guaranteed staff shortages in American hospitals for the foreseeable future. The vax does not halt transmission, so no marginal benefit to patients regarding covid risk either.
Not only that, rural health care is going to be devastated. There was plenty of warning about this. I am not smart enough to postulate how practical considerations should inform judicial decisions vs. legal ones. But it seems to me that the real world effect (negative or positive) should imply some logic that the court needs to consider before rendering decisions.
I saw somewhere else today that one workaround for facilities that don’t want to lose workers can employ might be to grant lots of exemptions. Not sure if that will work but it’s worth looking at I suppose. Otherwise, there’s going to be a cascading collapse of parts of the healthcare system I bet based on comments from Denninger earlier.
MikeyinFL, the CMS rule does provide for medical or religious exemptions. The basis for medical exemptions appears to be limited to a history of allergic reactions (i.e., anaphylaxis) to shot ingredients. There are no exemptions based on medical history otherwise (for example: heart conditions, history of thrombosis or stroke, autoimmune disease, or neurological issues).
The employer is responsible for determining and documenting the legitimacy of religious exemption requests. I have a cousin who is a nurse and was recently hired; he made it clear he would not work without his religious exemption being in force. The employer was amenable to that. I suspect many employers will be willing to grant religious exemptions (as you note) to keep their facilities open. The old saying that "There are no atheists in foxholes" may now become "There are no atheists in rural clinics."
That does sound promising. The ruling today re OSHA may provide encouragement in that direction. Why should healthcare suffer when other industries don't have to, and there's a "workaround"?
That was my thought exactly. If these knuckleheads can finally see the error of their way then perhaps they will become less authoritarian in an effort to avoid financial insolvency. If not, as Denninger would say ___ them.
Knuckleheads is too kind. Craven cowards and murderers maybe. There is a gigantic problem opening up and if you ask me it's intentionally being caused by the criminals at the top, pushing the vaxx is destroying the hospital industry entire.
And can they now mandate boosters?
From the dissent of Justice Thomas: “Yet here, the Government proposes to find virtually unlimited vaccination power, over millions of healthcare workers, in definitional provisions, a saving clause, and a provision regarding long-term care facilities’ sanitation procedures,” - that sure sounds like they can. He continues: "Had Congress wanted to grant CMS power to impose a vaccine mandate across all facility types, it would have done what it has done elsewhere—specifically authorize one.” Yeah, you would think. But apparently all power resides with the CMS once the facilities have accepted the Medicare and Medicaid money.
Oh, and one last point on the HHS decision: what about commandeering of the states? Where is the limit to what the federal government can do via taxing the states and localities to the point where they can't pay for things themselves, then having the federal government pay for these things instead, and then having some lowly, unelected bureaucrat in that same federal government saying, "but we'll only pay for these things if you do what we say"? Not Congress. A solitary, unelected bureacrat.
Maybe this wasn't the best case to deal with this issue, especially since it was ruling only on the stay and not on the merits. And maybe it will be appealed and then granted cert and then maybe the issue will be brought up. But I doubt it, and that's too bad...in my very personal and maybe even lonely opinion.
Kavanaugh's a bust. To me, it's official. No time to go into it now, but I'm confident enough to just state it without evidence for the time being. He was supposedly against the administrative state, but I've seen no evidence of that over his tenure so far.
And neither he nor Barrett could be bothered to join with Gorsuch and Alito to join Thomas' exceedingly modest opinion striking a very modest blow for the major questions and non-delegation doctrines. Without the support of those two, that opinion has no force of precedent. Maybe they just think there will come a better case to assert themselves behind those doctrines, but I have a hard time seeing how supporting them in this instance would have complicated doing so again in some later one.
Okay, fine, the OSHA thing got struck down. But just think how outraged we'd all be if it hadn't. Which is to say, it was an absolute no-brainer even for a squish like Roberts.
Lastly, I won't be able to read the other case's ruling until later, but I'd just throw a couple questions out there: if HHS ruled that all health care workers had to wear a bright pink belt and suspenders to fight covid, would that be equally permissible? Or what if they mandated NO masks could be worn by health care workers - would that too be fine? Perhaps they would be - as I said, I haven't yet read the ruling and so I don't know what the majority decision was based on.
But my obvious point is, can they rule anything they want regardless of the evidentiary basis? If the evidentiary basis matters, then not only did the Court get this wrong, but the lawyers arguing against the mandate screwed up every bit as badly as so many have said in not making the evidentiary case (on grounds both of low efficacy and of high risk) against the mandates in their arguments.
Sorry for the negativity, but then again most here are probably used to it ;^>
These cases came before the Court on the issue of whether the stays should remain--essentially preliminary and procedural matters. There are two admin law cases coming up this term that should be decided on substance.
Thanks for the info, Mark. Good to know.
Perhaps this CMS ruling could accelerate changes towards a more cash-based medical system. Away from insurance of all kinds.
There would need to be further protections under law--witness the suppression of early treatment.
In the Healthcare case Justice Amy joined the Conservative Three while Roberts and Brett joined the Crazies. That makes it a narrow 5-4 decision. Here's from the concluding paragraph from Alito's dissent:
"Neither CMS nor the Court articulates a limiting principle for why, after an unexplained and unjustified delay, an agency can regulate first and listen later, and then put more than 10 million
healthcare workers to the choice of their jobs or an irreversible medical treatment."
Three cheers for POTUS DJT & his 3 SC picks!
If HRC would’ve won, we’d be looking @ an entirely different verdict think it safe to assume.
For now, just a simple WooHoo!!!!
SCOTUS: https://www.scribd.com/document/552661840/SCOTUS-OSHA#download&from_embed
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/21a244_hgci.pdf
I should add, this is a major defeat for the Prog agenda.
You betcha… Couldn’t happen to a more appropriate bunch...
I regard him as a squish, too.
Well, look who he ran with as a youth...
One would have expected the Federalist Society to do better. One would have been disappointed.
In fairness, there is a specific law regarding healthcare. I've seen strong opponents admit it was probably a correct decision at this point.
As I have said elsewhere, It seems strange to me, that the Country’s highest court can rule on an issue that seems to be in direct conflict with the Nuremberg resolutions regarding forcing experimental medicine on an unwilling American citizen.
I was hoping that these two issues would have been answered not with a resounding no, but with an unanimous HELL NO. But, I have been disappointed in the past and will be certainly disappointed in the future.
That's not how the case was presented to them. It may yet come up. I would have liked to have seen that addressed.
The irony? Healthcare workers know better than anyone else that these shots are not the answer. More apt to be the problem.
True, but the decision was about OSHA's authority under Congress' enabling statute, not about the injections.
You're correct--it's not an apt comparison.
On balance I agree with the dissenters, but neither I nor the dissenters agree with you.