Judges must be getting tired of all the oddball lawsuits that the Republicans have been throwing at them. Tuesday, Oklahoma’s Governor Kevin Stitt (R) discovered that his state’s attempts to halt the Pentagon’s COVID vaccine mandate for federal employees failed. Never mind that President Joe Biden used the vaccine mandate to save people’s lives and the lives of those around them.
Of course, the federal judge denied Oklahoma’s lawsuit. District Judge Stephen Friot pointed out that the state’s suit was “without merit.” The state’s governor said he refused to take the booster shot. Of course, if that is true, he may be adding himself to the dire plains states’ coronavirus statistics.
Friot wrote in his opinion, according to The Axios:
‘[A]dding a tenth FDA-approved vaccine to the list of nine that all service members are already required to take would hardly amount to ‘an enormous and transformative expansion [of the] regulatory authority’ the Secretary of Defense already possesses.’
The judge found that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin and President Joe Biden’s administration did, indeed, have the constitutional authority needed to create and enforce the vaccine mandate.
Since Oklahoma had tried to exempt the Oklahoma National Guard from the president’s mandate, Governor Stitt may have been about to set up his own military people. The mandate stated that Air National Guard and Army National Guard members who fail to get vaccinated, even if the state says otherwise, will not be paid and can not participate in drills and other activities. Makes sense, of course.
The judge continued:
‘And, to say no more on this point, there is nothing ‘transformative’ about a force protection measure first conceived and enforced by General George Washington when he required members of the Continental Army to be inoculated against smallpox.’
That was when the state of Oklahoma filed its lawsuit calling President Biden’s mandate unconstitutional. It warned that some of the Guard members would rather quit than be forced to inoculate.
And apparently on a roll, Oklahoma decided to throw the rest of the Oklahoma federal employees into its suit.
Then, the judge wrote that the president had implemented a “more than a novel application of long-established and congressionally-granted administrative authority:”
‘[E]ven if we were to assume that the mandate is in some way novel in the sense contemplated by the major questions doctrine, it would be nothing more than a novel application of long-established and congressionally-granted administrative authority.’
Judge Friot received his nomination to the Federal Bench by President George W. Bush in 2001. He pointed out a fundamental reason to not block the vaccinate mandate, according to The Washington Post:
‘It is unmistakably clear that the intent of Congress … is that the Guard and its members will at all events be prepared, conformably to federal military standards, to be ordered into federal service … on little or no notice.’
Naturally, we assume Oklahoma’s lawsuit was just a trial balloon, and then it would take its suit to the Supreme Court.
Featured image is a screenshot via YouTube.
Three White Lions podcast, Gloria Christie reads a chapter from her book of the same title. She also writes for the liberal online newspaper The Bipartisan Report. Gloria Christie Report her newsletter for people on the go. Written in her own unique style with a twist of humor in a briefer version of Bipartisan Report. Christie’s Mueller Report Adventures In Bite-Sizes a real-life compelling spy mystery (in process). Find her here on Facebook.
