America's Talking - Episode 21: Lawsuits Target Biden Administration Over Mandatory Vaccinations

Episode Date: November 5, 2021

Analysis: Heavy Democratic losses hurt Biden agenda. Lawsuits target Biden administration over mandatory worker vaccinations for larger employers. COVID mandates oust cops nationwide, police leaders warn of fallout. Supreme Court to consider major gun rights case this week. 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 and Focus powered by thecentersquare.com. I'm Cole McNeely. 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. Coming up right after this on America in 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 the center square.com,

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The Biden administration on Thursday announced a January deadline for new private sector vaccine mandates that could affect 100 million Americans. A number of groups quickly filed lawsuits saying the mandate is illegal. President Biden announced the mandate in September, but this week details were released, most notably that businesses with 100 or more employees must ensure their workers are vaccinated or require weekly COVID testing by January 4th. Read more about these stories and many others, visit thecentersquare.com. Now for a closer look, it's Dan McAulb and Casey Harper.

Thank you, Cole, and welcome back to America in Focus, powered by the Center Square. I'm Dan McAulb, executive editor of the Center Square Newswire Service. Joining me again today, as he does every week, is Casey Harper, the Center Square's Washington, D.C. Bureau Chief. We are recording this on Friday, November 5th. Casey here in the suburbs of Chicago, we're having overnight temperatures in the 20s. Is winter coming already? Winter is here with all its fury. So you're ready, get your jackets out.

And you know what that means? It's really basically Christmas season. Are you a Christmas music person? Oh, I am. I am. Oh, my God. It's early November, not until after Thanksgiving or even December. Should we be starting that stuff.

I would sing jingle bells, but I think we'd have to pay some royalties or something. Too early in the morning for me to hear you sing jingle bells, Casey? Wow. Why don't we get into it? For an off year, it was quite the election season this week. Big election news in Virginia and elsewhere around the country. What is the, Casey, what does the election in Virginia mean for, potentially mean for next year's midterms? Yeah, it's a great question.

I mean, anyone who's been following the news has seen that there was big Republican upsets this week. New Jersey's governor race was supposed to be easily won by the Democrat, and it was extremely close race. And at times the Republican candidate was winning as the votes came in. Now, in Virginia, Republicans really routed the Democrats of statewide elections and appearing to take back their House of Delegates, the General. or assembly. So, of course, the most famous race among those was the governor's race, where Terry McCallough lost to the Republican Challenger. So, you know, of course, many people know that, but what does it mean is a big question? Well, it really means a few things. First off,

it seems that when it came time to vote, voters voted more along their cares about the economy than they did about COVID. We've seen recent polling. that Americans, you know, concern over COVID is actually dropping and their concern about the economy is rising. And I think that played two Republicans' advantage. Another thing that we saw was the defund the police initiative, which has been a big political topic. It was, you know, totally defeated in Minneapolis, which is really the start of the defund the police movement, is because it's where, you know, George Floyd was tragically murdered. So to have defund the police lose in Minneapolis is really going to, I think, deflate that movement. If you couldn't defund

the police in Minneapolis, I don't think it's hard to push for doing it somewhere else. And so, you know, as far as the immediate political implications, it's really twofold. One, you know, some analysts say this is a foretelling or a sign of what will happen in the midterm elections next year. In some ways, it's, you know, kind of hard to say when we're a year out. But if you're a Democrat right now you're not feeling very excited or comfortable about the trajectory. And then even more immediate is the Democrats, you know, trillions of dollars in spending, which they're frantically trying to get across the finish line, the reconciliation bill and the bipartisan infrastructure bill. And it's kind of, you know, you can you can argue both sides about how these elections play into that. But there's

plenty of people saying that these bills go too far. Americans don't want this. And at the very least, Democrats do not have a mandate from the American people because they're so voters were really rebuked them at the polls this week. So a lot to unpack there. Casey, one thing in, let's start with the Virginia governor's race. Glenn Yonkin, a first-time political candidate, the Republican there, was trailing in the polls for months, closed the gap. at the end. One policy issue that affected that race that you didn't mention was education. Carrey McCullough, former governor, Virginia's got sort of an odd rule that you cannot run for consecutive terms for governor. So he was the governor four years ago, had to take a term off,

ran again this time. He infamously said at one of the debates last month, quote, I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should do. Glenn Yonkin jumped on that issue, used it in advertisements, used it at news conferences and addresses to his supporters, said parents should have, absolutely should have a right in their children's education. Of course, in Virginia and across the country, parents have been showing up at school boards, upset over COVID policies, upset about the teaching of critical race theory. In his victory speech, Glenn Yonkin said this was a victory for school choice, and he planned to promote school choice policies in Virginia.

What's your take on that whole thing? Was this a victory for parents? Yeah, I mean, you're absolutely right that Republicans were able to take this issue and run with it. And Terry McCullough really made that very easy for them by making the comments he referred to. And then he really didn't apologize explicitly for them. He just, he tried to say he was taking out context. He tried to accuse Republicans of twisting his words.

He never said, hey, that's not what I meant. I'm sorry. You know, that didn't happen. And so, you know, it kind of plays into the common criticism of Democrats that they're kind of elitists who look down. on everyday people to tell parents that they aren't smart enough to inform the education of their children. Really played right in that mean. And, you know, what you see from a lot of campaign experts and, you know, political analysts right now is they're saying, if Republicans can maintain this and become the parent or the party of parents, that is going to be disastrous for Democrats

in the next election. Because really what we've seen in recent years is that these elections come down to suburban voters often because rural goes red, inner city will go blue, and so it's that buffer between them that can often make the difference. And suburban voters is a bunch of parents like with kids who, you know, the reason many people move to the suburbs is because of their kids because of, you know, wouldn't have a bigger house and yard and all those kinds of things school districts and so if you can become take up the mantle of parents you can really potentially take suburbs around the country and I think that is what you know Democrats who are huddled in strategy rooms for the coming months that's what

they're going to be talking about how do we reclaim this how do we make sure that Republicans don't put down roots in this way now I'll say Virginia was kind of unique because there was a terrible sexual assault case in Loudoun County that really riled a lot of people up. And they have accusations that the school district covered that up. Right, right. Yeah. And so that was, you know, that made it, it was unique and that helped make it such a big issue in the state. I mean, education is usually not the top issue for voters, and it's definitely not a leading

issue for Republicans historically. but that case really helped propel it to the forefront. It just seemed like Terry told her to call off totally dishandled it. And Clint Yonkin channeled that outrage. And that COVID mandates, you know, making kids wear masks. A lot of parents are upset about that as well. And so, you know, maybe if you're a parent, you'd say, okay, maybe I fought to have masks not be a thing or I did this. And I lost and the school board disagreed with me.

Okay. But to tell me that I can't even have a thing. say in what my can you know i mean i think that was just a bridge too far for most people in clen yonkin jump on it yeah so let's you touched on also the defund the police um effort in the measure in minneapolis where uh the city council and the mayor uh placed on the ballot this referendum to replace the police department with a department of public safety in which Maybe there'd be some police officers investigating and fighting crime. I don't know.

But voters just resoundingly killed that. So what do you think that means for defund the police efforts across the country? Voters in Minneapolis, of course, where George Floyd was murdered last year was essentially the spark of these anti-police protests across the country that led to rioting in major cities everywhere. Do you think because of voters essentially resoundingly saying no to defund the police Minneapolis, does that hinder to fund the police efforts nationwide? I think it will hinder it, but I don't think it'll kill it overall. You're right that Minneapolis is really the spark for this movement. You know, what we've seen the last year and a half is that violent crime has

risen significantly. It's no small rides at all. I have, you know, some of the data before me. I mean, the FBI data, homicides, this is just for the last year, 2020. Homicides rose nearly 30% in 2020 in one year. Aggravated assaults rose by 12%,

which is the first time in four years that violent crime rose from the previous year. There's 21,500 about reported murders in 2020, which is the highest figure we've seen in decades. you know, some small nonviolent offenses decreased and I guess that's good news.

Things like home burglaries, but people were stuck at home during the pandemic. Pandemics, so you're not going to break into a home if you know everybody's there. So that makes sense. But if you know that the police force is holding back or been defunded, you might be less worried about having a detective investigating it. you know, murder for weeks if you're, you know, battling over turf or somewhere or something like that. So violent crime has exploded. At the same time, now this is not totally related, but so that that is happening. And there's, there's questions about anti-police sentiment, fueling that, defund the police,

a lot of police officers in many cities are being told to hold back to not aggressively police certain neighborhoods where they know that the higher percentage of crime is happening or coming from. So a lot of those factors are playing in. A lot of cops feel like that if they do get into a sticky situation where maybe they have to make a tough decision that they won't have the support of their, you know, of their police department because of the politics involved, that their, you know, police department might throw them under the bus for political expediency. And so all those factors have made, you know, the kind of more proactive,

policing decrease. Now, at the same time, what's compounding that more recently is these are these COVID-19 vaccine mandates. And so now, of course, every industry is experiencing some level of people who are saying, well, I don't want to take the vaccine, but it's hitting local police departments pretty hard. And so, you know, for example, New York City, they recently hit the deadline for municipal workers needing to be vaccinated. And as of last week, there's 26,000 unvaccinated. city workers and including 17% of police officers. So, you know, that's, I mean, in a city as big as New York City, losing 17% of your police force because they're put on unpaid leave.

So maybe they won't ultimately be fired. Maybe they'll come around. Maybe the city will cave. But you've seen police departments around the country who are losing, you know, 5, 10, 15, in this case, 17% of their police officers overnight in a time when, crime is the highest. It's been in decades. So we're going to touch on, we're going to dig deeper into the vaccine mandate, mandates in just a second one. One last question on this topic. We referenced up front the

midterms next year. Every single member of the U.S. House is up for re-election in 2020, about a third of the U.S. Senate. The Democrats have the slightest of margins, the slightest of advantages in the U.S. House. It's a 50-50 split in the U.S. Senate with the Vice President getting the deciding vote that tips it to the Democrats. But are Democrats worried about what this week's means heading into next year? Do they face losing the House and potentially the Senate? I think they are very worried. They have a razor-thin majority in the Senate as thin as it can possibly be.

The House, you know, they have a very small majority there. You know, you remember what happened in 2010. when President Obama, you know, maybe made some missteps, passed some pretty aggressive legislation, and then the Tea Party formed, came back, and just wallops Democrats in the 2010 elections. That's happened a couple times. It's also pretty normal for the midterm election

in the first term presidency to be a swing election. So if a Republican wins, you remember Trump won And then two years in his presidency, a lot of Democrats got elected. It's kind of a rebuttal to him. So that's already kind of baked in. And to see these big losses on top of that, it's showing that it could be a much more. People are using the term red wave, but it's something like that in November. And the last thing about that is that President Biden's approval ratings are very low for this point in a presidency.

see they're honestly the only person as low as him in recent years has been President Trump. And he's well below where President Obama and other presidents have been at this point. So different polls show him in different places. Some have them as low as 42% approval rating and somewhere around, you know, 51% disapproval rating. So if that number stays where it is, that is something really to pay attention to for our listeners because that trickles down. because people who are upset at the president, you know, they just go and they might vote down the party line. They just hit, you know, click or click or write in all Republicans. And so I think you saw that in Virginia.

People upset at the president just voted Republican. And that's going to happen in the terms if Biden isn't able to turn around this public opinion. Let's turn to these vaccine mandates. Casey, yesterday on Thursday, the Biden administration announced that it's that his, mandate on the private sector employers, employers that employ more than 100 workers, will have to enforce a vaccine mandate on all of their workers, or if the workers decide not to get the vaccine mandate or the vaccine that they have to be tested weekly, this starts on January 4th, immediately business groups and others filed lawsuits

against it saying it's unconstitutional, it's unlawful. Tell us more about this. Yeah, this is a big story and it's not going to weigh. This is going to be what you're hearing about through the whole holiday season, which honestly may not help the approval ratings we just talked about. I don't know if people want to be debating mandates over their turkey and a holiday ham. But yeah, this is going to be- If they get a turkey in a holiday ham, better get it soon.

Right, if they can afford one with the inflation and it's able to be shipped to them in the time. So the Department of Labor's occupational safety and health administration, which people say OSHA is the accurate for that. You're going to hear about OSHA. OSHA is in charge of a lot of workplace safety things in the country. Many people don't know that. But, you know, the people who make you wear hard hats on the construction side, OSHA. It's about workplace safety. So they are the ones in charge of this and they release, you know, more details on the regulation.

Biden is really the one behind this. And as you said, January 4th is a deadline. So the few things are really interesting about this. One is it's kind of unprecedented to have the employee safety agency enforcing a broad nationwide mandate with a fine on it. And so the fine is $14,000 per violation. You know, the White House did a press call with an unnamed senior administration official by an administration official. And they talked about these. And it was really interested out, what stood out to me about that call was this quote.

So they said, if we identify that an employer is willfully violating a standard, then that penalty is significantly higher than a workplace that is not willfully doing so. So they're looking at intent. They're seeing who is, basically if someone is standing up to this on principle, they're going to be severely punished. And, you know, $14,000 per item. So you can imagine, it's kind of unclear exactly how the finding will work. And I think we'll get more detail on that. But you can imagine if someone has a few hundred employees that are refusing the vaccine and defying the mandate. And the employer is sympathetic to them.

And he lets it go, you could be 14,000 per employee, potentially per day, which, you know, I'm going to imagine. If you have a 2,000 employees, you can be hundreds of millions of dollars, actually, pretty quickly if you fight this for a couple, a few months. You know, and so this is a, this is not a small thing. This is a way to really bludgeon people into compliance. This fine. 14,000 may sound small, but if you have several employees daily defying this and you're not stopping them or firing them, essentially, then you can really rack up fines. It also requires that people wear masks on, on the work site. One interesting thing to add to this, I'll toss about you, Dan, is that on the latest Rasmussen polling actually fast. found that more than half, 52% of Americans support those who would resist the workplace mandate. So many Americans have gotten the vaccine about over 70%. But even then, the majority of them don't think someone should be fired or looser job for not getting it. This is coming at a time, Casey, when there's a massive worker crisis, worker shortage across the country. briefly reference the supply chain crisis.

We've got ships that we can unload because there's not enough workers to unload them. Even when we do unload them, we've got our truck driver shortage, so we can't transport goods across the country in a timely fashion. We have stores right now with empty shelves, people warning that for Thanksgiving. In Christmas, there's going to be empty shelves. What does a vaccine mandate like? this. You referenced the Rasmussen poll. Obviously, we've seen resistance to vaccine mandates in hospitals and police departments across the country. What could this potentially mean? This January

4th is two months away right now. What could this mean for that worker shortage right now? And is it possible? There's going to be a large percentage of workers who are going to be forced to leave their jobs or fired because they refuse to get the vaccine. And what's that going to mean for the economy overall? Yeah, it's almost certain that there are going to be workers fired over this. We've already seen, you know, I referenced police departments earlier, but many cops have been, you know, taking early retirements, they're leaving, you know, moving to other departments that don't have a mandate. You're already seeing it there. You're seeing it in other industries. It's almost certain, you know, it's hard to gauge the percentage because I'm sure there are people

who have been holding out on getting the vaccine, who when it comes down to it just won't be willing to give up their job for it. But there are plenty of people who will be willing to give up their job. So we're going to see, you know, widespread job transition. I think, you know, this is kind of a prediction. I think you're going to see people advertising that they don't have the vaccine mandate and that people should come work for them. I think you're going to see when we talked about these lawsuits, and it'll be interesting to see this could potentially be expedited to get ahead of that January 4th deadline. So it may be that we have some sort of court ruling. before January 4th, that at least puts a stay on this and delays that deadline.

And I think actually the Biden administration knows that. I've noticed a trend in there in some of these men, the eviction moratorium, which was, you know, they even said themselves was unconstitutional, but they did it anyway. I think what they, their strategy in passing or enacting some of these questionably constitutional measures is that even if it doesn't hold up, it will motivate a lot of people to get vaccinated who think it will hold up. So even if they think it's going to get struck down by January 4th, they know that between now and then, you know, maybe tens of millions of people will get vaccinated and comply in anticipation. I think that's, it's honestly a part of the strategy.

So that's, you asked about some of the implications what we can expect to see. I think those are a few things. And you also referenced a lawsuit. So there's a few groups already suing. Ron DeSantis, Republican Governor of Florida is suing. There's a few groups. And one of them is the job creators network, which represents a lot of businesses. And this is a, I was read you this quote. This is kind of some of the language that's being used against this mandate. They said, the Biden administration's vaccine mandate is clearly illegal and will have a devastating impact on our small business community and our entire economy. We're assuming on the administration on the grounds that OSHA does not have the authority to

impose such a mandate. Even if OSHA did have the power, there is neither the grave danger nor necessity to issue such a sweeping regulation. So that's what you're hearing from opponents. That's the kind of language you're going to see in lawsuits. And it'll be interesting to see if the courts intervene between now and January 4th. And the other, OSHA, as you mentioned, is responsible for workplace safety. But isn't there some sort of a hypocrisy here where employers of 100 or more workers are required to enforce this vaccine mandate?

But employers of fewer than 100, it must be a, that when you have 99 workers, it's a safe workplace. But when you have 100 or more, it must be an unsafe workplace. That just seems so contradictory. Yeah, I think a lot of people agree with the kind of arbitrary nature of that. You can speculate as to why it's done that way. I think the leading speculation would be that large corporations are probably going to be the most willing to comply and have the most financially to lose. corporations have also shown an unwillingness to be politically anti-Vat COVID anything. But, you know, doing it this way would be a way to get, you know, millions and millions of people who have vaccinated without touching on the small mom and pop shops around the country, which are probably going to be the ones most fiery, most resistant, you know, honestly, you know, small business owners, I believe, lean.

Republican. So it's because of taxes and different things. So it'll be, you know, it could be that he tries to lower it down though to 50 and then, you know, 25. Well, it'll be interesting to see. I mean, but you're right that it's kind of just seemed like an arbitrary number. Casey, we could talk about this all day. We didn't even get into the enforcement aspect of it. I mean, this is going to affect more than 100 million workers across the country. How many? The staff, are taxpayers going to have to fund for OSHA to add to enforce this mandate for 100 million workers across the country? I don't want you to answer that question right now because I want to, in the limited time we have, I want to touch on one final topic. So let's move on.

We only have a brief amount of time. The Second Amendment was on trial this week as the U.S. Supreme Court took up a major gun rights in this case out of New York. Tell us about that. Sure, this is a pretty significant Second Amendment case. So the quick summary, as we ran out of time, is that a couple of guys in New York State applied for, you know, concealed carry permits. And they were denied. They were denied the permit because New York State has pretty strict laws and requirements. You essentially, if you want to have a concealed carry in New York, you're in its way.

It's like being guilty until proven innocent. The answer is no, unless you prove that you have a really compelling reason to conceal carry a gun. And so they sued and it went before the Supreme Court Wednesday. Based on the questioning of the justices, it seems like they were actually pretty open to overturning this law or changing it. As with all Supreme Court rulings, they could be very narrow and limited to this case or they could use it as an opportunity to make more broad sweeping rulings. And so that's something to be on the lookout for. There are other similar laws in other states. So it could be possible that concealed carry is opened up to a lot of people in states that don't allow it.

But the one wording that stood out to me that those challengers to the law use is the high and arbitrary standard that the state has set. And I think that that is kind of what it's going to come down to. what kind of standard can the state set that's not high and arbitrary? You know, a comparison to this would be abortion cases. You know, Texas, not this most recently, but a few years ago passed a law that abortion clinics had to have all these requirements on their facilities. And so it basically had to have like surgical level, you know, they put all these requirements on what kind of office an abortion doctor essentially had to have.

And so it was clearly to the court not just intended to make sure that abortion clinics were safe. It was intended to lower the number of abortions, right? And so the court didn't side with them. They said it was, you know, the intent was clearly to just lower abortion. And so it could be a similar kind of argument here with this New York case, which is you're not just trying to make sure. the right people get guns. You've actually purposefully created a standard that's so high and arbitrary because you don't want anyone to really have these guns. So I think that would be the question

in hand, and we'll see. On Wednesday, they seem open to actually changing the law. And we expect a decision next spring? Yes. Yep. All right. Thank you, Casey. That is all the time we have. This has been the America and Focus podcast for Casey Harper. I'm Dan McAulb. We'll talk to you next week.