"The vote in the employer mandate case was 6 to 3, with liberal justices in dissent. The vote in the health care case was 5 to 4, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh joining the liberal justices to form a majority. ... the court’s conservative majority seemed doubtful that the administration had congressional authorization to impose the requirements."
Does anyone have a guess as to how a vote by Congress to authorize OSHA vaccine mandates would fair? Would it be one of the purely partisan issues, like Build Back Better and the voting legislation? I suppose that the fact that it hasn't already passed is evidence that it wouldn't.
>Does anyone have a guess as to how a vote by Congress to authorize OSHA vaccine mandates would fair?
If I understand correctly, S.J. Res 29 [1] is a senate resolution that answers this exact question. Looking at the voting result [2], 2 Democrats voted YAY (ie expressing disapproval of the mandate) along with some Independents and all Republicans. This leads me to believe that a similar rule would not pass the Senate. Although there could be more to the story, eg I don't know the motivation that the two Democrats had when voting YAY, especially given at least to my understanding this kind of vote is more symbolic than anything.
Ah, surprised that I didn't think of it that way, considering the way that I learned about this Senate resolution was by reading the majority decision: "In fact, the most noteworthy action concerning the vaccine mandate by either House of Congress has been a majority vote of the Senate disapproving the regulation on December 8, 2021. S. J. Res. 29, 117th Cong., 1st Sess. (2021)." [1]
Why does so much news coverage insist on dividing the Court into "liberal" and "conservative" justices?
It's almost as if the media thinks there's not enough partisanship in the legislative and executive branches, so they need to inject a red vs. blue narrative to the doings of the Supreme Court.
Doesn't SCOTUS typically decide cases more based on technical legal criteria than partisan ideology?
Justices are specifically chosen for their liberal or conservative ideology and perceived loyalty in hopes of ruling in favor of the party in power's long term agenda. Republicans appoint conservative justices, Democrats appoint liberal judges. Both assume quid pro quo. Ignoring this fact is simply naive.
>The ratio is staggering. According to the Supreme Court Database, since 2000 a unanimous decision has been more likely than any other result — averaging 36 percent of all decisions. Even when the court did not reach a unanimous judgment, the justices often secured overwhelming majorities, with 7-to-2 or 8-to-1 judgments making up about 15 percent of decisions. The 5-to-4 decisions, by comparison, occurred in 19 percent of cases.
You've fallen prey to media outrage mongering. If you go look at decisions for yourself instead just the ones the media tells you about, you'll find that it is also common for the "conservative" and "liberal" justices to switch sides.
Most cases which come to the supreme court aren't particularly partisan. The purpose of the Supreme Court is to clarify what the law is, and many ambiguities do not fall along a conservative-liberal axis. Someone can be a conservative and still agree with liberals on many things, and vice versa; indeed that's how intelligent people with well developed opinions ought to behave. Even on partisan issues, there is still typically an element of degree - an extreme conservative may see something as reasonable while a moderate conservative may not. That conservative and liberal justices in some cases vote with each other is in absolutely no way evidence that they are not conservative or liberal.
This is true, but it's still much rarer for cases to be genuinely mixed. If you do see a 6-3 decision, it's nearly certain to be along party/ideological lines.
It's remarkable that this was a 5-4 decision against the conservative justices. The vast majority of 5-4 decisions will be a single conservative justice siding with the liberal justices.
When a case is nonpartisan, they will have a lot of unanimity, and a small number of dissents from it. But when the case is partisan -- and a fair number of them are -- they will fall along partisan lines. There just aren't that many cases of serious but non-partisan disagreement.
Well, I left my 15+ year career in the defense industry due to Joe's federal contractor mandate. Maybe that one will get struck down next and then I can go back. If I want to.
If an all remote company wants to impose a vaccine mandate I suppose they can...., but I mean it seems like a huge waste of time. Hiring in engineering is already so hard right now no need to make it harder.
Are you saying if someone isn't vaccinated for Covid 19 they can't be a good team member and contributor at a high level? Because that sounds really really bad.. and dangerous.
Large companies with older workers will eventually have to mandate, they can’t afford the long covid costs/insurance. They can’t fire people for smoking or obesity, but this will give them an out.
More youthful companies will punt but check back in when Covid-35 or -40 hits.
I wonder if Health Insurance providers will make it mandatory or have different rates based on vax.
Due to the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), medical insurers can't legally set premiums based on vaccination status. However, employers are generally allowed to cut their contributions to employee insurance premiums on that basis.
I'd like to see insurers say "due to COVID our costs have gone up but you can get a discount if you're vaxxed." Increasing just for unvaxxed is probably hard but offering an incentive may work.
Where I work we have a mandate and it's like 98% compliance. A few have opted to go 100% remote so they can avoid the vaccine but practically nobody quit over this.
Wonder if that would be legal under ACA and other existing laws regulating health insurance. You can do it for tobacco use but can't do it for a whole lot else. They'd probably need Congressional approval and if that were possible, Congress always would have passed a mandate law instead of the Executive Branch trying to make their own law.
Can you please outline what your point is? Excess deaths in the U.S. align with these numbers. I don't think it is valuable to attempt the pedantry of "with" versus "from", when there is clearly some causation.
The point is that COVID isn't nearly as dangerous as the the non-stop media fear drums are making it out to be. A gallup poll shows that an un-vaccinated person only has 0.8% chance of even going to the hospital if they catch covid, which means dying FROM covid is even less. The risk of death is exceptionally low and the response to the virus has been extremely disproportionate to it's actual threat.
Including a gun shot victim, or a heart attack victim, etc. in the COVID death numbers is extremely disingenuous.
But how are they to run a fear campaign if they can't manipulate the numbers, and how will the companies profiting from the scare be successful if they can't use shady tactics to achieve their desired goals?
They don't need to run a fear campaign, they already own you. Most companies are losing money, especially the ones generally calling the shots. Kind of hard to exploit the plebes when they keep getting sick and infecting all the other serfs.
Really pathetic how human brains prefer good narratives to simple ones. A novel coronavirus (from the world that brought you Ebola, H1N1, Zika) becoming super prevalent and disrupting volatile networks of interdependence <<< a global conspiracy to further control citizens that already live under a so-called "Patriot Act" surveillance state.
Dying isn't the only outcome, and you can't work while you're sick. This isn't some flu, it has long term implications for 10-30% of those infected and is extremely contagious. Many ICUs are at capacity or beyond it, and it wasn't long ago NYC and Milan were storing bodies in refrigerated containers. A small percentage of a big number is still a big number, if anything our response has been underwhelming.
How do you want to explain away the excess death numbers? We are undercounting COVID deaths in the US, especially in rural areas where vaccination rates are lower. Globally the same thing is true. Excess deaths in 2020 and 2021 are higher than tallied COVID fatalities and other explanations don't account for the magnitude of the difference.
What's disingenuous is saying everyone is too afraid of the virus when non-tech sectors still have to go in to work, all of the financial support for those impacted dried up, 20% of all inpatient beds registered with the HHS are in use specifically for COVID, etc.
A million or more Americans are dead of COVID and most of those were easily preventable. The only thing saving us from that number being much higher is an extremely high-tech medical system and passable infrastructure. If we had a death rate like Brazil with the case loads we're experiencing maybe more people would take it seriously and get a jab. Or not, at this point I expect nothing from US citizens. It's unbelievable to me that antivax sentiment has been allowed to fester in the "marketplace for free ideas" that we've forgotten how life was before robust public vaccination campaigns.
Ah yes, a Gallup poll is certainly reflective of actual medical reality. Especially when a non-zero number of people die from Covid while claiming it isn’t real.
The 0.8% wasn't the result of the poll. That is the actual, factual number. The polling part was what democrats and republicans think is percentage of people who catch covid end up in the hospital for covid (both were way too high, 41% of democrats thought your chances were over 50%, while 22% of republicans thought there was an over 50% chance of going to the hospital).
or perhaps I should improve my comprehension of just reading your original comment? sigh. Alas I can't update my comment to acknowledge that i'm a dumbass who can't fully read a plaintext comment? :-/
It was 1-5% chance of hospitalization for the unvaccinated, compared to less than 1% for the vaccinated. You should do more reading as well. Democrats were more likely to accurately guess the hospitalization rates for vaccinated individuals and Republicans were more likely to know the number for unvaccinated ones. Wonder why that is?
An interesting question is how many would have died if America was not so obese? It seems, given the comorbidities, that governments should have been messaging on this front much more than they have. The with to from covid is a spectrum with inconsistent definition.
That's kind of where I'm at this point. I just want to know the non obese number to know what I need to do for myself besides vaccination and already having the virus. Or can I just go on with life? It's really the same way I want to know how many people die of Lung cancer that aren't smokers so I can get radon detectors for home and not be around people that smoke and potentially any other risk factors I'm at.
There is information out there for things you can do, but it's largely been labeled anti-vax because it's often paired with questions about the need for vaccines in healthy individuals.
Science has suffered greatly in this pandemic, I'm worried for the rippling effect in the future.
Fair question. We are still operating in the real world. US has an obesity epidemic and that should be fixed, that doesn't prevent the real-world death and healthcare stresses that we are seeing and will be many years of work before the obesity epidemic is tackled. We have to operate in the world we live in with the precautions we take.
We can't just blanket say: "Well you all are obese, so we aren't going to do anything" and instead are trying to do something that might help millions more not die. I have a lot of reservations about many of the tactics, but at the same time the answer is not "do nothing" (which I don't think you are recommending, but is the recommendation of some that repeat these talking points).
Brazil has a lower obesity rate and much higher fatalities. It's a multifaceted problem and I think it's irresponsible to paint this as a "if you die from COVID it's your fault because you had comorbidities". That's eugenics. If you're drunk and get into a car crash the ER is still going to treat you. It's a shame governments worried so much about messaging instead of sending free PPE and paying people + small businesses to stay home for a month or so and actually enforce it.
And what is your point exactly? COVID can kill an individual thousands of times faster than they can shed their other comorbities. So then what? In an ideal world, the government would have focused on health YEARS ago, but that's not real life. In real life my grandmother cannot walk and is overweight, and thus cannot do almost anything about it. So should she just die in your scenario? And that's fine because she's older and fat?
The pandemic has been on for 2 years now. Everyone can reduce obesity by consuming fewer calories even if unable to exercise. Let's focus on finding solutions instead of making excuses.
My point is that there has been a singular focus rather than talking about all of the things that can help. Obesity and losing weight is just one of those.
Several policy decisions ignore the science and have made matters worse.
This terminology ("with") has been used problematically in the past including calling into question covid death numbers. Including a commonly repeated line of: "All deaths right now are accounted to covid because everyone has covid." and then downplaying the severity of what is going on. We should be more clear about the use of language when stating things like this because, frankly, the words we use matter. This post in particular does not explain what the goal of your statement is.
I looked at a few of these and funny enough it calls out that covid is still partially responsible for the excess deaths, just not directly: i.e. full ICU beds, lack of care due to covid healthcare stresses, and other indirect causes. There are other excess death causes right now including drug epidemics but we should not attempt to downplay that a large amount of the excess deaths are directly accountable to the covid situation.
"The vote in the employer mandate case was 6 to 3, with liberal justices in dissent. The vote in the health care case was 5 to 4, with Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh joining the liberal justices to form a majority. ... the court’s conservative majority seemed doubtful that the administration had congressional authorization to impose the requirements."
Does anyone have a guess as to how a vote by Congress to authorize OSHA vaccine mandates would fair? Would it be one of the purely partisan issues, like Build Back Better and the voting legislation? I suppose that the fact that it hasn't already passed is evidence that it wouldn't.