By John F. Di Leo -
Joe Biden wants everyone to be vaccinated against the China Virus commonly known as Covid-19.
Whether that’s a good idea or not is at this point an open question. The vaccines and boosters currently available appear to be ineffective at preventing people from catching the virus, but there is evidence often interpreted as proof that they are effective in reducing the danger of the virus to those who do catch it. There is also evidence often interpreted as proof that they are dangerous, often causing severe heart ailments in otherwise healthy people. The oddity here is that the virus may be most dangerous to people who are already sick, and the vaccine may be most dangerous to people who are otherwise healthy.
With billions of people getting doses of brand new vaccines, it is difficult to tell – because much of the information is censored – whether these side effects are statistically worthy of note, or are so rare, statistically speaking, that we shouldn’t worry about them. Anyone on either side who says this is a clear-cut issue is jumping to conclusions. We simply can’t be sure yet.
So, most reasonable people’s natural gut instinct is to treat this like the annual flu shot, and make a personal decision on whether to take this particular vaccine or not.
Just like the annual flu shot, employers have the right to encourage it. Just like the annual flu shot, employers even have the right to offer to pay for it, or to have their health insurance benefit pay for it. They don’t have to; but they certainly can.
Joe Biden, however, who sat in the Senate for thirty-five years, then sat in the White House for another eight, and now sits in his basement playing statist-in-chief, isn’t satisfied with the Covid-19 vaccines being optional. He wants them to be mandatory.
He can't do this. Legally, his role does not include that power.
So Joe Biden had what must have seemed to him like a brilliant idea. He stood up one day last fall and said he was going to issue a national order that all employers, public and private, who employ 100 people or more, have to mandate Covid-19 vaccination on their own employees.
Since he couldn’t order it himself, but he supervises OSHA, he figured he could just tell OSHA to issue the mandate, and have OSHA force all these private employers to issue their own mandate, like the chain of command in an army: The general orders the colonels, the colonels pass on the orders to the majors, and so forth.
There was a problem with this, however. Not only does Joe Biden not have this power… neither does OSHA.
This really can’t be a direct analogy to the military chain of command, after all, because the private sector does not report to the federal government. In fact, the private sector doesn’t report to any level of government. If anything – in a Constitutional republic – the government reports to the private sector, not the other way around.
Joe Biden never learned that, or at least, never understood it. That’s what happens when you order your chief executive by mail-order, and get stuck with one who flunked out of third grade.
So Joe Biden issued an order he couldn’t legally issue, to a federal bureau that didn’t have the power to legally do it. That federal bureau attempted to follow Biden's directive anyway, issuing an order it couldn’t legally issue.
The businesses of the nation then did what they had to do: they sued.
The case went to court, and made it to the Supreme Court, where it should have been unanimous… but it wasn’t, because other corrupt presidents have appointed other incompetent justices to the Supreme Court over the years.
The decision of the day was to reject this order, but it may not be final, because it’s conceivable that an equally illegal change in the law might convince one or two more justices to allow OSHA to issue this illegal order.
There is a theory out there – it’s wrong, but it’s out there nonetheless – that a federal bureau can do anything it wants, if only Congress passes, and a President signs, a law authorizing that bureau to do it.
So, as soon as the Supreme Court ruled against OSHA's mandate, the most corrupt minds in Congress put their heads together and started counting, to see if they could craft a bill that could squeak through our two evenly divided houses, directly authorizing OSHA to issue federal vaccine mandates. At the moment, therefore, the nation hasn’t been saved from this illegal mandate; we’ve just won a little time, that’s all.
Why? Because we may still encounter the same problem: the people who believe in the rule of law are up against the people who advocate for the rule of corrupt men instead.
Now, as anyone who has studied our Founding Fathers certainly knows, just because a Congress or a President want something, that doesn’t mean they can do it. Just because they get a majority to pass a bill, and convince a doddering puppet in a Delaware basement to sign that bill, that doesn’t mean it has the force of law.
In fact, this is a Constitutional republic. That means that the federal government is only allowed to do what the Constitution of the United States says it can do. Period. Case closed.
We used to know that, in America, but it’s been forgotten.
Even if the House passed a bill 435-0, the Senate passed it 100-0, and a President signed it in blue ink the next day… it would not have the force of law, and would be on track to being overturned, if it’s unconstitutional.
Because – in the United States – the final arbiter is the Constitution. It's not just up to the Supreme Court or the White House or the Congress. It's up to the Constitution. In order for a federal bureau to issue any order at all, either the Constitution must have given the department that power, or the Constitution must have authorized Congress to thus empower that bureau.
The Constitution does not give the federal government any power whatsoever to mandate that any private citizen accept any vaccine. Ever.
It would take a Constitutional amendment to give the federal government the power to issue such an order. Without such an amendment, the Tenth Amendment answers the question: the power to decide whether to order an employee to accept a vaccine is reserved to the states and the people.
What the Democrats are counting on is that the Supreme Court will imagine that Congress has the right to provide a bureau with an authority it doesn’t have. And sadly… it’s happened before.
What we the people need to do, therefore, is to remind the Supreme Court – especially the one or two wishy-washy members who may be persuaded – that we the people do still support our Constitution, and we do not want Congress to make up this power out of whole cloth, to give to OSHA. The American people must make ourselves heard on this matter of basic Constitutionality.
Not for the first time, we are reminded of the need to elect representatives, first and foremost, who will honor their oath to uphold and obey the Constitution.
That’s their job. In fact, it’s the job of everyone in government. Our first President, George Washington, certainly knew. He saw his entire role in the legislative process to be, fundamentally, as defender of the Constitution. If Congress passed a Constitutional law, he felt his duty was to sign it, whether he liked it or not. If he thought Congress had passed an unconstitutional law, then he felt his duty was to veto it, again, whether he liked it or not.
Back in the days when we had a real President, he knew that every elected official’s duty, first and foremost, is to obey the Constitution, and to always be alert to the need to bring government back, whenever it overruns its borders, back within the boundaries set by the Constitution. That’s every politician's job.
And oh, how we do need Congressmen like that, today, more than ever.
We need Congressmen, today, who will stop bothering with the jab, and instead, will start doing their job.
Copyright 2021 John F. Di Leo
John F. Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based trade compliance trainer and transportation manager, writer and actor. A one-time county chairman of the Milwaukee County Republican Party, he has been writing regularly for Illinois Review since 2009.
A collection of John’s Illinois Review articles about vote fraud, The Tales of Little Pavel, and his 2021 political satires about current events, Evening Soup with Basement Joe, Volumes One and Two, are available, in either paperback or eBook, only on Amazon.
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