Judge Deals Blow to Biden’s Employer Vaccine Mandate

The Biden administration's employer vaccine mandate took a beating this week from one of the nation's top judges, a major win for red states and conservative groups fighting it in court.

Chief Judge Jeffrey Sutton of the Sixth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in a lengthy dissenting opinion released Wednesday called the mandate an unjustified overreach. Mandate challenges will inevitably reach the Supreme Court, where Sutton's views carry weight, and his dissent provides a useful roadmap for justices inclined to strike the rule down.

"A dissent at the appeals court often grabs the attention of Supreme Court justices, and even more so when it's written by someone like Chief Judge Sutton, who is respected across the board and has sent former clerks to work for every single sitting justice," said the Pacific Legal Foundation's Elizabeth Slattery.

The vaccine mandate is on shaky political ground. Democratic senators Jon Tester (Mont.) and Joe Manchin (W. Va.) last week joined all 50 Republicans to pass a repeal measure in the Senate. And surveys show that a lopsided majority of Americans are tired of pandemic restrictions. Almost 70 percent of respondents told the Trafalgar Group that new mandates and restrictions are not required to manage the COVID-19 Omicron variant.