RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2022/01/supreme-court-hears-oral-arguments-biden-covid-19-joseph-klein/

The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments on January 7th regarding two Biden administration COVID-19 mandates. One case arose from a challenge to a vaccine-or-test-weekly mandate imposed on private-sector employers with 100 or more employees. This mandate was issued in the form of an “emergency” rule by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA). The other case focused on a vaccination requirement imposed by the Department of Health and Human Services for healthcare workers at health facilities participating in the Medicare and Medicaid programs.

The Biden mandate that drew the most skepticism in varying degrees from the Supreme Court’s six conservative-leaning justices is the OSHA private business vaccine-or-test mandate. There appeared to be less inclination on their part to strike down the health care workers vaccine mandate. The three leftist justices – Sonia Sotomayor, Stephen Breyer, and Elena Kagan – expressed full support for the Biden administration’s mandates in both instances.

The conservative justices expressed concern during the portion of the oral arguments devoted to OSHA’s emergency mandate order about whether there was proper legal authority for OSHA’s action. They raised questions regarding the implications for the separation of powers between the executive and legislative branches of the federal government. They also inquired into whether OSHA had intruded on the states’ ability to exercise their constitutionally-reserved police powers to protect the general welfare and health of their own residents.

The trio of leftist justices defended the OSHA private business vaccine-or-test mandate largely on public policy grounds. Reaching, by hook or crook, what they felt was the right policy outcome to protect the public against the historic COVID-19 pandemic was all that mattered to them.

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2022/01/the_supreme_courts_mandate_review_may_be_the_last_chance_to_rein_in_agencies.html

As if we needed confidence in yet another American institution destroyed, we were treated with a true spectacle of deceit in last Friday’s Supreme Court’s oral arguments on OSHA’s vaccine mandates. With the hysterical hyperbole of a CNN anchor, Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a self-proclaimed “wise Latina woman,” refuted that description by declaring, “We have hospitals that are almost at full capacity with people severely ill on ventilators. We have over 100,000 children, which we’ve never had before, in serious condition and many on ventilators.”

Despite her Yale pedigree, or perhaps because of it, as physicist Wolfgang Pauli famously quipped, she’s “not even wrong.” You must at least be in the ballpark to be wrong, especially when the facts are easily accessed on HHS and CDC websites. As of today, hospital capacity is at 79% with only 18% being used for COVID; there are 140 COVID hospitalizations of children; and cumulative child COVID cases since its inception total just 5520. Ventilator use, which proved deadly at the beginning of the pandemic, is used in only 3% of the cases.

Extending her epidemiological deception to the legislative record, Sotomayor explained, “OSHA proposed regulations, it didn’t act fast enough, and Congress told it to act faster.” The problem is, not only did Congress do no such thing, it did exactly the opposite! Only a month ago, the Senate, with Democrat support, passed S.J. Res 29 to nullify OSHA’s vaccine mandate.

As implacably vacuous as Sotomayor’s hysterics were, Justice Elena Kagan plunged the Court to a level so benighted it made Robert’s “it’s a tax” seem like wisdom from the Oracle of Delphi. While her progressive ramblings are certain to inspire the army of “experts” infesting every crevice of DC’s bloated bureaucracy, they betray a profound contempt for constitutional law:

So who decides? Should it be the agency full of expert policymakers and completely politically accountable through the President? This is not the kind of policy in which there’s no political accountability. If people like this policy, they’ll go to the polls and vote it that way. If people don’t like it, they’ll vote that way. This is a publicly — a politically accountable policy. It also has the virtue of expertise. So, on the one hand, the agency with their political leadership can decide. Or, on the other hand, courts can decide. Courts are not politically accountable. Courts have not been elected. Courts have no epidemiological expertise. Why in the world would courts decide this question?

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2022/01/leftist_supreme_court_justices_abandoned_the_law_and_made_up_facts.html

In Supreme Court arguments on the OSHA COVID Vaccination Mandate case, the “Wise Latina” revealed at least Sixth Degree Stupidity for all to see. One should not casually suggest that a graduate of law school who has ascended through the ranks to the highest Court in the land is stupid. But that is the inescapable conclusion her performance requires. For those who missed the demonstration of her upward failure, we must present the details. But first, we must look at the question the Supreme Court is supposedly trying to address.

Justice Kavanaugh granted the emergency appeal in NFIB v OSHA, and limited it to legal issues only:

Whether the Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s Interim Final Rule: COVID-19 Vaccination and Testing; Emergency Temporary Standard, 86 Fed. Reg. 61402, violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 or the First Amendment.

This is a question of law. It does not in any way address how many of what sort of patients tested positive, became ill, were hospitalized, placed in the ICU, required a ventilator, or died. Those are medical questions and are outside the legal “Question Presented.” This is more than a technical distinction. The Supreme Court grant of certiorari specifically states what it will hear arguments about. Briefs for the appeal must address those arguments. But Justice Sotomayor must have missed that detail in law school.

https://issuesinsights.com/2022/01/10/exporting-our-worst-product-wokeness/

Is “woke” the new abnormal?

Something America ought to export to other — more normal — societies? Because it’s been such a success in America? Like Crystal Pepsi and the Ford Edsel? 

George Mason University economics professor Tyler Cowen thinks so. Wrote so, in a recent column for Bloomberg News. He also wrote a book about “The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream.”

But what does he mean by that?

Historically, it has been taken to mean the opportunity to pursue one’s dreams, workwise and otherwise. To build the kind of life that suits — on the merits. 

To live — and let live.

For the Woke, this is a nightmare.

Wokeism is about ending that dream — and replacing it with a collective nightmare, in which almost everyone is a victim and those who aren’t are the victimizers. A world in which who you are is defined by who you look like, who you sleep with — and above all, the politics you espouse. It is a world of plural first-person pronouns and the fungibility of objective reality; of homogenous “diversity” — and you’d better not question it.

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/biden-administration-guidance-prioritizes-race-administering-covid-drugs

Guidance issued by the Biden administration states certain individuals may be considered “high risk” and more quickly qualify for monoclonal antibodies and oral antivirals used to treat COVID-19 based on their “race or ethnicity.”

Older age, obesity, pregnancy, chronic kidney disease, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease are among the multiple medical conditions and factors associated with what are considered “high risk” individuals by the FDA.

Some states, including New York and Utah, have made it clear they will prioritize certain racial minorities over other high-risk patients when it comes to the distribution of particular COVID treatments.

Last week, New York’s Department of Health released a document detailing its plan to distribute treatments such as monoclonal antibody treatment and antiviral pills.

The plan includes a section on eligibility for the scarce antiviral pills that people must meet to receive the treatment, including a line stating a person needs to have “a medical condition or other factors that increase their risk for severe illness.”

One such “risk factor” is being a race or ethnicity that is not White due to “longstanding systemic health and social inequities.”

https://www.wsj.com/articles/omicron-makes-bidens-vaccine-mandates-obsolete-covid-healthcare-osha-evidence-supreme-court-11641760009?mod=opinion_lead_pos5

Dr. Montagnier was a winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for discovering the human immunodeficiency virus. Mr. Rubenfeld is a constitutional scholar.

Federal courts considering the Biden administration’s vaccination mandates—including the Supreme Court at Friday’s oral argument—have focused on administrative-law issues. The decrees raise constitutional issues as well. But there’s a simpler reason the justices should stay these mandates: the rise of the Omicron variant.

It would be irrational, legally indefensible and contrary to the public interest for government to mandate vaccines absent any evidence that the vaccines are effective in stopping the spread of the pathogen they target. Yet that’s exactly what’s happening here.

Both mandates—from the Health and Human Services Department for healthcare workers and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration for large employers in many other industries—were issued Nov. 5. At that time, the Delta variant represented almost all U.S. Covid-19 cases, and both agencies appropriately considered Delta at length and in detail, finding that the vaccines remained effective against it.

Those findings are now obsolete. As of Jan. 1, Omicron represented more than 95% of U.S. Covid cases, according to estimates from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Because some of Omicron’s 50 mutations are known to evade antibody protection, because more than 30 of those mutations are to the spike protein used as an immunogen by the existing vaccines, and because there have been mass Omicron outbreaks in heavily vaccinated populations, scientists are highly uncertain the existing vaccines can stop it from spreading. As the CDC put it on Dec. 20, “we don’t yet know . . . how well available vaccines and medications work against it.”

https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2022/01/09/the_progressive_logic_of_build_back_better__and_its_dangers_147003.html

“Build Back Better” is far more consequential than the earlier COVID relief packages. That’s why Democrats are so angry at those who blocked its passage and so determined to push it forward.

Why is BBB more important than the COVID legislation? Because pandemic relief was essentially a massive stimulus program, with the usual smorgasbord of treats for favored groups, but little more than that. Although BBB is also a massive stimulus, its real importance lies in the permanent entitlement programs it would launch, everything from universal pre-K and Medicare expansion to mandated paid leave from private employers.

Those are major building blocks in the Democrats’ long-term plan to construct a full-fledged social-welfare state along European lines. Achieving that ambitious, transformational goal — while making irreversible changes in how America governs itself — is why the party is fighting so hard and why the left is so furious about the Senate stalemate, personified by West Virginia’s Joe Manchin, a Democrat who refuses to go along, either to pass the bill or eliminate the filibuster to pass President Biden’s non-budget initiatives.

Enacting these massive, new entitlements is one reason the House bill is rightly called “progressive.” The second, equally important reason is that nearly all Democrats, except Manchin and his Arizona colleague Kyrsten Sinema, are willing to break the Senate’s longstanding rules and procedures to achieve their desired outcome. This determination to override traditional governing procedures and the institutions that embody them has been a hallmark of capital-P Progressivism since Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette came roaring into the Senate in 1906.

By 1912, Theodore Roosevelt was running for president as the Progressive Party nominee. Woodrow Wilson, the man who gained the Oval Office by TR’s third-party candidacy, had embraced progressivism while a professor (and later college president) at Princeton. Wilson and progressive public intellectuals such as Herbert Croly explained their rationale far more candidly than their political descendants do. The Constitution, they rightly noted, encumbered our national government with its enumerated powers, decentralized federalism, multiple veto points for any new policies, and strong protections for private property, contracts, and minority-party rights. Progressives argued that those restraints may have been fine for the 18th and 19th centuries but not for the 20th, which needed a far more active state.