Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced that he is filing a lawsuit against President Joe Biden over the "unconstitutional" employer vaccine mandates issued through the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA).
DeSantis said in a statement that the lawsuit will be filed with the United States Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit as soon as the emergency temporary standard (ETS) is published in the Federal Register.
OSHA announced the details of the plan on Thursday, November 4, which applies to businesses with a hundred or more employees. It also announced its rule from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), which requires 17 million health care workers at federal-funded facilities to be vaccinated.
The White House pushed back the deadline for health care workers to get fully vaccinated to January 4, 2022. This also applies to federal contractors.
Biden's administration announced in September that federal workers and contractors will be required to get a COVID-19 vaccine. Contractors originally had a December 8 deadline to mandate their employees to get the shot.
DeSantis said that the vaccine mandate will severely impact state's public and private companies that receive millions of dollars in annual federal contracts.
"We started with 15 days to slow the spread and now it's get jabbed or lose your job. We're supposed to be a government of laws, not a government of men. This OSHA rule is 500 pages of a government of bureaucracy, a government that is being run by executive edict, not a government bound by constitutional constraints," DeSantis stated.
He also said that Florida will immediately challenge the OSHA rule in court due to its inconsistency with the Constitution. DeSantis pointed out that it is not legally authorized through Congressional statutes. The federal government cannot unilaterally impose medical policy under the guise of workplace regulation as individuals should make informed choices of their own about their health.
DeSantis added that it is important to stand up for people's individual ability to make decisions for themselves. He pointed out that Biden's mandates will exacerbate a lot of existing problems that can be seen now with the economy.
One of the "atrocious aspects" that DeSantis saw with the OSHA rule is the section wherein OSHA will issue an ETS if it determines that "employees are subject to grave danger from exposure to substances or agents determined to be toxic or physically harmful or from new hazards, and an ETS is necessary to protect employees from such danger."
DeSantis pointed out that if such danger is as grave as Biden says it is, it should not have taken so long to publish the rule, nor should it take longer to implement it.
The mandate would impact nearly 9,000 employers in Florida as well as the 4.5 million that they employ, making up 60 percent of the state's workforce.
States push back against Biden's mandate
Alabama, Arizona, Arkansas, Indiana, Iowa, Louisiana, Missouri, Montana and South Dakota all said that they will also file lawsuits against the mandate. Attorneys general of Ohio, Kentucky and Tennessee also expressed that they will take legal actions against the White House. (Related: More than half of U.S. states vow to fight Biden's vaccine mandate.)
As for the Biden administration, it plans to provide "education and counseling" for federal workers who don't get vaccinated by the deadline, according to Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky.
"For the small number of people who do not comply by the deadline, the first step is a period of education and counseling," she said. She also stressed that it is important to remember that the COVID mandate is a process, the point being that people have to get vaccinated, not to be punished.
Agencies will not be removing their employees from federal service until they have gone through the process of education and counseling.
The president himself said that an overwhelming majority of Americans chose to get vaccinated. "Despite what some predicted and falsely assert, vaccination requirements have broad public support," he said.
Read more about the COVID-19 vaccine mandates at Pandemic.news.
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