America's Talking - Episode 14: President Biden unveils controversial COVID plan

Episode Date: September 10, 2021

President Joe Biden announced sweeping new COVID-19 vaccine mandates that will force millions of unvaccinated Americans to receive the vaccine, undergo weekly testing or lose their jobs, flipping on a promise the president made in 2020 that he would enact no such mandate. Biden rolled out the list of stringent new rules via executive orders and federal regulatory changes Thursday, most notably requiring that all private employers with 100 or more employees ensure that their employees are vaccinated or get tested weekly. Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/america-in-focus/support Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to America in Focus, powered by thecentersquare.com. I'm John Spataro, and this is the 36th week of 2021. Coming up, we'll take a quick look at one of the top stories from the center square.com, and later, executive editor of the center square, Dan McAulb, and DC reporter Casey Harper, will take a deeper dive into some of the top stories of the week, including fallout from President Biden's controversial new COVID-19 plan, a growing divide between the amount of open jobs and job seekers and a look back to the 9-11 tragedy 20 years ago. Coming up right after this on America and Focus, powered by thecentersquare.com. Hi, this is Chris Krug, publisher of the Center Square. Our team produces the nationally read and recognized news stories at thecentersquare.com,

the country's fastest growing, non-profit, nonpartisan, state-focused news and information site. We deliver essential information with a taxpayer sensibility through reporting that's easy to understand and easy to share with your friends and family. We know that you need information that allows you to understand what the governor and your local legislators are doing. Get the news that you need to know at thecentersquare.com. That's thecenter square.com. Thecenter square.com. Welcome back. Here are the top stories of the past week on the center square.com.

President Joe Biden has withdrawn his nomination to lead the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms. David Chitman was tapped by Biden to lead the ATF, but was criticized by Republicans for making anti-gun comments as well as connections to gun control groups. After the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Afghanistan left dozens of casualties, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle are searching for answers on what went wrong. The Senate Armed Services Committee announced this week that it will hold. a hearing on September 28th, focusing on the Afghanistan withdrawal. Top officials such as Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin, General Mark Milley, and others are expected to testify. And areas of Louisiana

hit hardest by recent hurricanes could finally see some federal relief. President Biden formally issued a disaster aid request that includes $14 billion to address damage caused by last year's hurricanes, as well as $10 billion for recovery from Hurricane Ida, which made landfall last month. To read more about these stories and many others, visit thecentersquare.com. Now for a closer look over to Dan McAulb and Casey Harper. Thank you, John, and welcome to America in Focus, powered by the Center Square. I'm Dan McAlep, executive editor of the Center Square Newswire Service. Joining me this week and every week is Casey Harper.

the Center Square's Washington, D.C. Bureau Chief. Before I bring in Casey, let's hear from President Joe Biden from his stunning news conference Thursday evening, September 9th, about his new nationwide vaccine mandate. I'm announcing that the Department of Labor is developing an emergency rule to require all employers with 100 or more employees that together employ over 80 million workers

to ensure their workforce are fully vaccinated or show a negative test at least once a week. Some of the biggest companies are already requiring this. United Airlines, Disney, Tyson's Food, and even Fox News. The bottom line, we're going to protect vaccinated workers from unvaccinated coworkers. We're going to reduce the spread of COVID-19 by increasing the share of the workforce that is vaccinated in businesses all across America. Casey, we're recording this the morning of Friday, September 10th, barely 12 hours after President Biden's vaccine mandate announcement when he expressed

outright anger at the unvaccinated. The word unprecedented, I feel, is often overused, particularly in these crazy times. But wow, regarding this new mandate, I feel it's appropriate. Tell us what we need to know about the president's plan, Casey. Sure. So I think unprecedented, it is fair to use in this scenario. Such a sweeping nationwide mandate from the top that's going to affect an estimated 100 million Americans is very significant. I don't think we've seen anything like this in a long time.

To get in kind of the details of the plan, Biden is using a combination of executive orders and federal regulatory changes. One of the most notable rules is that employers with more than 100 employees, must ensure that their employees are vaccinated, right? So that's a major, a major rule that's can, that right there will affect about 80 million Americans.

And that's enforced through the Department of Labor's Occupational Safety and Health Administration, which is OSHA. If you're, you know, I used to work in construction. We're very familiar with, or in surveying and, you know, very familiar with OSHA. They're the organization that, you know, enforces rules and ladders can't be this far from this.

or all the different things that are rules about the workplace. Well, they're really expanding the role of this agency that is really kind of one of a smaller agency focused on workplace safety to include this major rule. And so it'll be interesting to see a smaller agency handle so much power in such administrative work. But another part of the rules is that healthcare workers that work at places that receive Medicaid and Medicare funds,

pretty much all of them will also have to be vaccinated. There's also rules about people involved in the Head Start educational program, which Biden in his speech said was 300,000 people, which must be vaccinated. He's added, you know, a few different groups. And when you add all these up, it's up to 100 million people who the President of United States via executive order said must get vaccinated or face the consequences. Wow. Let me ask you to pause there. Previously, President Biden has mandated government workers, people who work in the public sector and certain fields of the public sector that they be vaccinated.

This is extending it to vast parts of the economy, private sector businesses. You said businesses with 100 or more employees, which is, as you said, up to 80 million Americans. How in the heck are they going to enforce this? Yes, when you get a vaccine, you get one of those paper vaccine cards. I'm assuming private businesses are going to have to try and force us, particularly major businesses of thousands and thousands of employees. How is this going to, I don't get it. How is that going to be possible? Yeah.

It's a good question. You know, it turns out that the only thing. the bigger businesses get, the more they become like the government, large, inefficient, bureaucratized, a lot of rules and regulations. So I think that a lot of them be very familiar with this idea and we'll play along. But as far as the enforcement mechanism, other, you know, there's been reporting that there's actually going to be a fine as much as, you know, $14,000.

We have, that hasn't really been confirmed, but $14,000 fine for businesses that don't comply. And so it's kind of a, and that's a, and that's a, for each in, for each of cases, I understand. And this is based on reporting from sources. This did not come from President Biden's mouth himself. But, but, but, um, some legitimate news sources have been reporting this. Right. And so the enforcement mechanism is your boss, you know, and I think that's kind of their workaround and their way that, just to not be so punitive to the individual is, uh, just go after every, everyone's boss. And so people are going to be afraid of getting fired, you know, because your employer doesn't want to pay this fine.

You're becoming a liability. And so really people are going to be afraid to lose their job and they're going to have to decide to get the vaccine or lose their job. It's really interesting, too. You know, another angle of this doesn't been talked about is the unemployment still remains high. But this is probably going to put a lot of people out of work. Well, and that's what we're going to talk about jobs here in a few minutes. But that's what's crazy about this whole thing.

There are plenty of, now, first, let me say this. I support people getting vaccinated. I don't necessarily support people being forced to get vaccinated if they want to. There are plenty of people out there who just questioned the entire process. This was somewhat rushed based on past vaccines, the approval process of this current vaccine. Only the Pfizer vaccine has been fully approved. The other vaccines that are out there have only been approved for emergency. use only during the pandemic.

There has been a hiring crisis during the pandemic because of enhanced unemployment benefits and other things. A lot of people have been hesitant to go back to work. In some cases, because of COVID, in some cases, because they're getting enough government taxpayer-funded benefits that they feel comfortable staying at home without getting a job. But now the president is mandating that about a hundred. 100 million workers in the United States be vaccinated. Those who have doubts about the vaccine or outright fears about the vaccine,

at least some percentage of those are going to refuse to get the vaccine still. So they're going to lose their jobs too. So that's going to just add to the hiring crisis. Yeah. And it's worth noting that Biden does allow for you can get weekly testing, at least for now. So if you can get a test every week. But if you don't get vaccinated,

if you're not vaccinated, you can get a COVID test. But a couple of things on that. One is that that was initially when Biden announced the mandate for federal employees. He made an announcement in the summer. And he said all federal employees must get vaccinated or face weekly COVID testing. And that was the law of the land for a couple, you know, really weeks, I guess. but and now his executive order changed that and said no weekly testing you know opt out you have to give action so he removed that but when he did it for for the private companies he he kept in the

weekly testing thing at least for now but he's done that once and removed it once so it'll be interesting to see you know if everyone does the weekly testing is Biden going to remove it and the thing about weekly testing is it's kind of expensive I mean I've been tested for COVID and you know there are places that are like free and things but it's not quite that simple because they could far away from you. They can be booked up. I mean, the place where I prefer to get tested for COVID, I don't have to test it, I think, a couple times. But it's a great place, but it's, there's a line or you have to sign up on the website, and sometimes they don't have slots open for days and days. So, and if you're requiring that, you know, if everyone in your town or your city where you live

is suddenly having to get a weekly COVID test, it's just going to overwhelm the system. So getting this weekly test is not going to be quite so simple or cheap. I think, uh, as people may think, because this year's going to overwhelm the system if you have 100 million, even just a quarter, if 25 million Americans are deciding they're going to get tested every week of COVID. I mean, I just don't think the system's going to be able to handle that. So it's going to be, there's already lawsuits lining up. Well, that's what I was going to say. Now, the pushback and the criticism of this plan after it was announced, it was harsh and it was quick.

Tell us a little bit about that. Republicans in particular Republican governors, Republicans in Congress, tell us a little about that pushback. Sure. There's been, you know, for one, there's been private companies that have said, you know, we're not going to do this and we are going to sue, because that's the first one to be affected and impacted is a private company, you know. I mean, if you own, if you're just like a Republican or conservative guy who owns a construction company,

with 150 employees in Kansas. And I mean, there's just, is this really something that you want to be focusing on thinking about right now? I mean, I just think that there's a lot of people that have been vocal. The RNC said they will sue Biden. The Daily Wire within just within like an hour, the Daily Wire is a right-leaning publication that definitely has more than 100 employees. They announced that they're going to fight this tooth and nail. So there's, you know, I think these are going to keep popping up.

It may get put into one large lawsuit. I would not be surprised at this. goes to Supreme Court because it's such a broad expansion of federal powers. It's reminiscent of the eviction moratorium, right? If you remember, we've been talked about that. We've been reporting on it at the center square.com. But Biden, you know, enacted this nationwide law, really, via just edict. And it says that landlords can't evict people even if they don't pay the rent. And it was the law of the land for a little while. We got challenged Supreme Court overturned it. So this could end up being the same thing. And I think, you know, I suspect actually that the Biden administration might know that that's going to happen.

But in the meantime, so many people get vaccinated that it'll address the problem. Because when they pass the eviction moratorium or when they, you know, announced the eviction moratorium it was ever passed in Congress. But they even said, like even the day before that they didn't think it could hold up in court probably. And then it didn't. And what's really interesting is I've just been reading through. There's so many people with, you know, Democrats or people within the Biden. administration who said that this is you can't do what they just did. I mean, Nancy Pelosi recently said that a vaccine mandate was a violation of privacy and it couldn't happen. The CDC

director, Rochelle Walensky, you know, very emphatically said earlier this year that it would not happen. There will be no nationwide mandate. I'll read this quote from Biden in December of last year. I'll see if I can find it, but he said, he basically said that this is not going to happen. Here it is. I don't think it should be mandatory. He said this in Delaware, December of last year. He's referring to the COVID vaccine mandate. And he said, I would not demand it be mandatory.

So all the critics are really throwing these things back in the faces. Biden said it wouldn't happen. Nancy Pelosi said it shouldn't happen. The head of the CDC said it shouldn't happen. And now it's happened. So, and oh, Jen Sacky said that it's not the role of the federal government. Very recently she said it's not the role of the federal government to mandate these vaccines. So this is a, you know, that's gearing up to be a great montage for a campaign commercial.

But I think a lot of people are not to, you know, the average person is like, okay, cares about the midterms, but this is going to impact their daily lives. And I think it's going to have to be a court decision quickly. So ultimately, yeah, I mean, the U.S. Supreme, this is, they're going to be so, many legal challenges to this new mandate that ultimately the U.S. Supreme Court is going to, it's going to have to get there and the U.S. Supreme Court is going to have to decide the constitutionality of this. Let's hope there's an expedited process because we all know that when you get stuck in the courts, it could take months or even years to get resolved. But just as we're talking here,

I have more questions than answers. Of course, as I mentioned, we're barely 12 hours from the announcement from President Biden. What about remote workers during the pandemic? A lot of companies have just sent their workers home. They're able to do their jobs, you know, in front of their computers at home or whatever. Are remote workers who aren't even in contact with anybody? Are they going to be forced to get the vaccine? Yeah, it's really, that's like a big, however relevant, really, to these rules.

I mean, remote work doesn't really protect you for anything. There's famously a student, university student was who, was kicked out of his online class for being unvaccinated. I don't know if you saw the story, but this, yeah, this mandate applies equally though. It doesn't matter if you're unvaccinate, if you're remote or not, if you sit at home and never go into the office,

you have to be vaccinated if you work for a company with more than 100 employees. Just a couple other notes. You know, this doubles the fine, this plan order doubles the fine for people who, basically act up on airplanes as well. So it's really just like a crackdown. Biden talked a lot about how teenagers over the age of 12 should get vaccinated in his speech,

which is kind of new rhetoric. There hasn't been very much push for minors to get vaccinated just because they're not very vulnerable to the disease. And it's been kind of a consensus that the risks outweighed that. And you referenced that also just yesterday, practically at the same time, the Los Angeles United Unified School District voted to require all students ages 12 and older.

The vaccine is only available, has only been approved for those 12 and older. So the Los Angeles Unified School District voted to require all students ages 12 and older to be fully vaccinated to continue going to in-person learning. If you're 12 years old and you're not vaccinated, beginning in January, you have to go to school remotely.

We all know the learning loss that students experienced during the pandemic when they were forced to essentially attend school on their home computers or their tablets or whatever. The technology in many locations isn't great. So if the Los Angeles School District did this, you've got to imagine that this, other school districts across the country are going to do something similar. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's really interesting on the kids from because the vaccine, you know, the Delta variant has, you know, there's been some reports that it affects young people more, but still, you know, young people are less vulnerable to COVID.

And so requiring all of them to get vaccinated, just really interesting thing. I mean, school boards are already just become the, in my, mind, some of the front lines of the political fighting that we're seeing with critical race theory, you know, vaccination, masks, so many of the hot topic issues have gone to the school board level. There's actually been, you know, studies showing that, or polls and things have shown that a lot of more people are running for school board, especially Republicans. So I don't know, I think we're going to see a lot of this playing out school board level. I don't think that this one California example is going to be the only example. So you can definitely be looking to see if your local school district is doing something like

this and what you can do about it. Well, Casey, we spent a lot of time on this story and rightfully so. Again, there's going to be ongoing developments. There's going to be legal challenges. So we'll continue to monitor this at the center square.com. I want to talk about another story this week briefly in the time that we have. Another new federal jobs report was released Wednesday. What can you tell us about that?

Yeah, so this is really interesting, even as we referenced the unemployment problem in the nation. You know, there's been inklings and evidence suggesting that we have widespread job openings and also people not going back to work, right, and choosing to stay home. And the reason for that that we reported on is just considering that it could be the $300 weekly federal unemployment benefits. and data from just August and July have really confirmed that. So Bureau Labor Statistics released a job, what's called the job openings and labor turnover survey, which just finds out how many people are looking for work or how many people are unemployed and how many job openings are.

And so it found that there are 10.9 million open jobs for the month of July. And at the same time, there were 8.7 million unemployed people, right? So that's really more than two million more open jobs. And so there's 8.7 million people who have, you know, a more than one job available to them and haven't taken it yet. Now, obviously, there's some considerations, you know, is it in your field and pay in closeness, but even then seeing this many more open jobs than workers is very, very, very unusual when unemployment remains elevated like this. And so just keep in mind that while the federal unemployment weekly benefits did end in September,

all the data we have right now is still for when those benefits are in place. So it would be really interesting to see if there is a drop in unemployment now that those weekly benefits are gone. But all the data from this year is just showing really supporting the hypothesis that so many Republican governors laid out, even some Republican lawmakers, which is that doubling unemployment benefits, through federal funds really kept a lot of people from going back to work when they could have returned to work. And kind of complicating it now is this new vaccine mandate. Who knows how that's going to affect the job market? You've got to expect it's going to have some impact, though, on jobs just because Biden's threatening people's jobs if they decide not to get the vaccine.

So interesting, we'll, of course, stay on top of that at the Sundance Square.com. Before we close, Casey, I feel we'd be remiss if we did not acknowledge the 20th anniversary of the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States. We're recording this on Friday, September 10th, tomorrow, Saturday, September 11th is the 20th year anniversary of those terrorist attacks that killed almost 3,000 American citizens. just a horrible day and a horrible memory from me. Casey, do you remember where you were on September 11th, 2001? Yes, I do. I remember I was in school. I just remember the moment.

I think we all do just kind of where we were, where we were standing, watching the TV, watching the towers. I was definitely, I was old enough to understand, but I was definitely younger. And it's a very vivid memory. It's honestly, it's kind of hard to even imagine people being alive who don't remember because it was such a cultural moment.

It was something, it's one of those things that everyone saw. And you mentioned it. Sorry to imagine those people, people who don't remember, are too young to remember or weren't even born. That's going to be essentially everybody in college on down to high school and other school-age children. But it's important that they learn this, learn about this in school, in my opinion. And I certainly want to continue acknowledging and continue respecting, showing our respect for the first responders on that day, who bravely, you know, went into the World Trade Center and the other sites where the planes crashed. In today's world, there's been a lot of backlash against first responders, particularly police officers in the wake of the death of Georgia.

Floyd and other incidents. But I just want to know we have your back as well. So thank you for your memories, Casey. We have run out of time here at the American Focus podcast. We'll talk to everybody next week.