Vaccine Mandate On Hold....

[seer]

Judge Blocks Biden’s COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate for Federal Contractors in 10 States

https://www.theepochtimes.com/judge-...heLibertyDaily

[seanD]

Judge Blocks Biden’s COVID-19 Vaccine Mandate for Federal Contractors in 10 States

https://www.theepochtimes.com/judge-...heLibertyDaily

Can someone who understands the legalities of this explain to me how a mayor (De Blasio) can get away with this authoritarianism if the POTUS can't.

[NorrinRadd]

Can someone who understands the legalities of this explain to me how a mayor (De Blasio) can get away with this authoritarianism if the POTUS can't.

My guess would be that "federalism" pretty much sums it up.

[Terraceth]

Can someone who understands the legalities of this explain to me how a mayor (De Blasio) can get away with this authoritarianism if the POTUS can't.

As NorrinRadd said, federalism sums it up, but I might as well give a more detailed explanation.

Federalism is essentially the idea that there are some powers granted to states that the federal government doesn't have. This is in opposition to a unitary state, where there is nothing an individual state can do that the federal government cannot. Most countries are unitary states (Wikipedia has a nice map at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unitar...ral_states.svg) but there are still a good number of federations in the world, including the United States.

In the case of the United States, the US congress has what is called the "enumerated powers" which is a list of powers it has. Any law it passes, or any exercise of a law that is passed, must fall under at least one of those powers. State and local governments, however, do not have that restriction. So long as their law is not actually prohibited (by the US Constitution, state constitution, federal law, or--in the case of local governments--state law), it is perfectly valid. So, as noted, there are things that a state government or local government can enact that the federal government cannot.

This is why there was that legal challenge against the individual mandate of the Affordable Care Act (that is, the fine you had to pay if you didn't have insurance) a while back even though basically every state had such an individual mandate for car insurance. The US government had to justify the individual mandate with an enumerated power, and the argument was whether or not it fell under any of the enumerated powers. As states don't have to worry about that, it was never an issue in state law.

There are two primary legal challenges to the vaccine mandate. The first is to say that the OSHA law, which is what is being invoked to set it up, does not actually permit it. The second is that the enumerated power it claims to be justified by, the Commerce Clause ("Congress shall have the power to... regulate commerce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the Indian tribes), does not actually justify the vaccine mandate.

Neither of those challenges are an issue for state or local law and therefore not an issue for De Blasio. Whether or not OSHA allows for it or not is irrelevant because, well, OSHA isn't what's being invoked here. Similarly, as state or local governments are not bound by the limits of the enumerated powers, that challenge doesn't work either.