Biden’s vaccination rules are more message than mandate

Biden’s vaccination rules are more message than mandate

AuthorKevin DrumPublished onSeptember 10, 2021 – 10:10 am58 Commentson Biden’s vaccination rules are more message than mandate

According to National Review, President Biden's vaccine mandate is illegal, unconstitutional, morally wrong, and impractical:

Beyond the serious legal and process issues raised by using a rarely invoked OSHA emergency authority to deputize private businesses to prod 80 million Americans into getting vaccinated, there are serious practical questions. And one of the problems with bypassing the typical regulatory process is that those tasked with implementing these requirements will have no opportunity to weigh in on the potential complications.

Just to think of a few complications, under this order, businesses will now have to set up a system for monitoring who has been vaccinated and who has not. They will also have to facilitate weekly testing for those who choose not to be vaccinated, and keep track of the negative tests. Who pays for the tests? What happens in the time that workers are waiting test results? This remains unclear as of now.

Hmmm. This does not seem like much of an organizational hurdle to me. I think the business community will be able to handle this pretty easily.

In any case, I think a lot of people are misjudging the point of the mandate. After all, its biggest flaw has nothing to do with its legal or bureaucratic aspects. It's the fact that the federal government has no practical way of enforcing it.

But that's OK. What Biden is really doing is giving cover to businesses that wanted to do this anyway. Until now, these businesses risked looking partisan if they mandated vaccines, but now they can simply say that it's the law and they have no choice. It lets them off the hook for making the decision.

And what will companies do to employees who refuse to get vaccinated or tested? I assume every company will decide for itself, but again, I think it's beside the point. What's important is that there are lots of people who will do something merely because it's "officially required." We saw the same thing with the Obamacare mandate: the fine didn't really matter. The mere fact that insurance became legally required was enough to make most people comply, even if they grumbled about it. It may not seem like it sometimes, but Americans really are mostly pretty law-abiding folks.

So that's that. The mandate gives cover to businesses and a quasi-legal mandate to individuals. But what's most important is that the message it sends—we're finally serious about this—should be enough to get a lot more people vaccinated regardless of its eventual legal status.