Biden knows his vax mandates are unconstitutional—but just doesn’t care

Clearly, President Joe Biden is not chastened by the Supreme Court smackdown he got just a couple of weeks ago, when the justices invalidated the eviction moratorium that even administration officials acknowledge was patently lawless right before Biden reissued it.

Quite the opposite.

The administration is similarly well aware that the national vaccine mandate that the president is poised to issue is unlawful. White House Chief of Staff Ron Klain made the obvious explicit by retweeting a progressive commentator’s observation that the ploy of imposing the vaccine requirement as a workplace-safety rule under OSHA (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration) is the “ultimate work-around.”

Translation: The president knows that an executive order mandating COVID vaccination would be shot down instantly, so he’s trying to camouflage it in a maze of Labor Department regulation.

Even on that score, the gambit cannot be justified. OSHA is trying to evade the Administrative Procedure Act’s requirement of a regulatory commentary period by slamming the vaccine dictate through as an “Emergency Testing Standard.”

It has been nearly 40 years since OSHA tried that trick . . . mainly because the courts struck it down, on an asbestos regulation, in 1983.

Here’s what we wrote after Joe Biden deliberately and flagrantly violated the U.S. Constitution over the eviction moratorium:

 You have to ask yourself: What is coming next? Will this administration suddenly get its fill of destroying the Constitution and the rule of law and then start building it back up again? Will it suddenly start giving up the power it has seized and return it to the people? Will it suddenly respect the rights of individuals, like the small-scale landlords it is bankrupting? Or does it have its sights set on the last remaining constitutional principles still intact? …

Biden, a 48-year career politician and former vice president, learned next-level constitutional violation from his boss, Barack Hussein Obama. As president, Barack Obama regularly violated the Constitution. He regularly seized power that our law did not give him. He abused his power in the Fast and Furious scandal (when the government intentionally smuggled firearms to drug cartels). He decreed that he would not enforce parts of immigration law he did not like. He forced through Obamacare. He conducted massive and illegal surveillance. He appointed federal bureaucrats without approval from Congress. He sent the military into Libya without consulting Congress. His Department of Justice introduced a rationale for killing United States citizens with drone strikes. He violated Americans’ free speech, freedom of the press, due process and other constitutional rights.

When President Obama wanted to do something unconstitutional, he just did it. He did not worry about the consequences. He did so many blatantly unconstitutional things during his presidency that the Supreme Court—even with four leftist justices—ruled against his administration unanimously 44 times, far more than any president in history. Yet he kept pushing. Now he keeps pushing, through his former vice president.

Practically every constitutional scholar says the government cannot force people to let tenants live on their land for free, but Representative Bush slept in front of the Capitol with a bag of Doritos like a homeless person for four nights, so Biden instructed the cdc to extend the moratorium. This is all pure theater to convince Americans to surrender their private property rights.

It is shocking how brazen the Biden administration has become. Not long ago, Democrats still tried to find some loophole to justify their unconstitutional power grabs. But with this extended eviction moratorium, they are openly declaring it is unconstitutional and they don’t care.

“The eviction moratorium is one of the most important stories of the covid-19 lockdowns but also one of the least covered, partly because its effects are so diffuse and partly because the left doesn’t want to draw undue attention to its evisceration of property rights under the guise of public health,” wrote John Daniel Davidson at the Federalist. “But the way all this has gone down illustrates a deeply disturbing reality about the Democrats running the pandemic response in Washington: They’re lawless, and as the pandemic drags on, they’re becoming bolder about it. … It should be clear by now that whatever else is constraining the Biden administration and Democrats in Congress, it isn’t the law. The law, for now, is whatever they say it is.”