A U.S. appeals court recently upheld a nation-wide injunction against President Joe Biden’s COVID-19 vaccination mandate for most federal workers.
The ruling 10-6 ruling on March 23 from a majority of judges on the New Orleans-based U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, who heard oral arguments in September, upheld the January 2022 preliminary injunction issued by U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Vincent Brown in the Southern District of Texas.
The injunction, in the Feds for Medical Freedom versus Biden case, effectively blocked the presidential mandate.
Thursday’s en banc ruling, the result of a rehearing of the case by the full appeals court, overrules an earlier 2-1 decision by a three-judge panel for the Fifth Circuit, which said the district judge lacked jurisdiction to hear the pre-enforcement case stemming from two September 2021 executive orders by the president.
“All that matters here is that plaintiffs have identified an illegal vaccine mandate and, separate and apart from any personnel action the president might one day take to enforce that illegal order, the plaintiffs want judicial review of it,” the full-court majority said in its 90-page ruling, which includes dissenting opinions.
“We hasten to emphasize that this case only involves a preliminary injunction,” the majority said. “The preliminary injunction’s purpose is to maintain the status quo.”
The appeals court majority, in an opinion by Circuit Judge Andrew Oldham, appointed to the court by President Donald Trump, said the plaintiffs, Feds for Medical Freedom, were not necessarily required to pursue their COVID-19 legal challenge through the Civil Service Reform Act.
The act applies to “discrete employment decisions” and not “not government-wide mandates that commandeer the personal medical decisions of every federal employee,” the court majority said.
Eventually both sides “will have to grapple with the White House’s announcement that the COVID emergency will finally end on May 11, 2023,” the court majority said. While the U.S. Supreme Court has recently rejected some nationwide injunctions, it has not deemed such injunctions “verboten,” according to the majority.
A dissent by Circuit Judge Stephen Higginson, a Barack Obama appointee, said the majority is correct in saying the Fifth Circuit has jurisdiction. “But contrary to a dozen federal courts—and having left a government motion to stay the district court’s injunction pending for more than a year—our court still refuses to say why the president does not have the power to regulate workplace safety for his employees.
“Today, our court affirms a nationwide injunction, put in place over a year ago, without explanation or analysis of any of the preliminary injunction factors,” Higginson said. “This method of rubber stamping a district court’s nullification of the president’s authority over the executive branch is unprecedented and improper on en banc rehearing.”
Courts have stayed busy nationally with pandemic-related litigation over the administration’s vaccination policies, including DOE-specific and other broader arguments, like the U.S. Supreme Court rejection of an Occupational Safety and Health Administration regulation for big companies.
In one such case, oral arguments were scheduled in Seattle during early May before the U.S. Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in David Donovan versus Brian Vance, a case brought by hundreds of federal and contractor employers at the Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in Washington state. The workers who challenged the site’s COVID-19 vaccination policy there lost at the federal district court level.
