Sixth Circuit Upholds Injunction Against Biden Administration COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate for Federal Contractors
Today a unanimous panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit upheld a district court injunciton against the Biden Administration’s order that federal contractors ensure their employees receive COVID-19 vaccinations. The opinion in Commonwealth of Kentucky v. Biden was written by Judge Larsen, and joined by Judges McKeague and Siler. I wrote about earlier decisions concerning this mandate here and here.
Judge Larsen begins with a summary of her opinion:
A fundamental tenet of our constitutional order is that the President’s authority “must stem either from an act of Congress or from the Constitution itself.” Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer, 343 U.S. 579, 585 (1952). The critical question in this case is whether the President heeded this rule when he ordered all federal agencies to include in their new contracts a provision obligating contract recipients to require their employees to wear face masks at work and be vaccinated against COVID-19. The President has claimed no inherent constitutional power here; instead, he maintains that the Federal Property and Administrative Services Act of 1949 authorized his order. The district court and a motions panel of this court concluded that the President likely exceeded his powers under that Act. We agree. We therefore affirm the district court’s decision to preliminarily enjoin the federal government from enforcing the mandate, but we modify the scope of the injunction.
The primary legal quesiton in this litigation concerns the scope of the President’s authority to impose conditions on federal contractors under the Federal Property and Administrative Services Act, generally known as the “Property Act.”
As I discussed in my post on a different Sixth Circuit panel’s earlier refusal to stay the district court injunction, the leading cases on this question are from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, which construed the President’s authority under the Property Act quite broadly. The Supreme Court has not addressed the question, and there are reasons to doubt whether the D.C. Circuit got this issue right.
Whereas the prior Sixth Circuit opinion tried to distinguish the D.C. Circuit caselaw, Judge Larsen explained why that caselaw did not, and should not, control, as it adopted an unduly expansive notion of the President’s authority. As she explains, the federal government’s position relies upon assuming the Property Act confers broad authority to pursue the statute’s purposes, despite the lack of any such delegation of authority in the law’s operative provisions.
The government’s statutory arithmetic starts with a fundamental error: It searches for power in a powerless provision. . . . A statutory statement of purpose provides no legal authority. . . . In
Article from Reason.com
