On Wednesday, First Liberty Institute filed a friend-of-the-court brief at the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit on behalf of dozens of members of Congress in Feds for Medical Freedom v. Biden. In that case, Feds for Medical Freedom challenged President Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for the federal workforce. After U.S. District Judge Jeff Brown issued an injunction blocking the mandate, the Biden administration appealed to the Fifth Circuit and sought an emergency stay of the injunction.
You can read the brief here.
“If the President wants to require that federal workers be vaccinated, he must go through the legislative process,” said Jordan Pratt, Senior Counsel for First Liberty Institute. “We hope the Fifth Circuit agrees with courts across the nation that are blocking the Biden administration’s unprecedented and clearly unconstitutional executive overreach. Under our Constitution, the President does not make the laws—Congress does.”
In his injunction issued last month, Judge Jeff Brown concluded the case is not about whether individuals should be vaccinated, “It is instead about whether the president can, with the stroke of a pen and without the input of Congress, require millions of federal employees to undergo a medical procedure as a condition of their employment. That, under the current state of the law as just recently expressed by the Supreme Court, is a bridge too far.”
According to First Liberty’s brief filed today, “Executive lawmaking threatens many freedoms, including religious liberty. One need not search the distant past to discern that truth. Over just the past two years, at all levels of government, America has witnessed a flurry of novel executive actions that infringed religious freedom.” The brief adds, “As the Supreme Court has held, these mandates are ‘no everyday exercise of federal power,’ as they reach well beyond any arguable workplace hazard and into all ‘daily life.’ And no less than worship restrictions, these mandates—including the ones at issue in this case—pose a crisis of conscience for many religious Americans.”
