President Joe Biden’s (D) administration wants the U.S. Supreme Court to declare lower court injunctions blocking COVID-19 vaccinations for most federal employees moot because the executive order at the root of the case has ended.
Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar filed the petition for a writ of certiorari July 21 asking the high court, an independent branch of the federal government, to review the earlier ruling in Feds for Medical Freedom. In March, the full New Orleans-based U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals voted 10-6 to affirm a national injunction first issued by a federal district judge in Texas.
The Fifth Circuit held the plaintiffs could challenge vaccination requirements in a September 2021 executive order in court instead of doing as the Civil Service Reform Act of 1978 requires and taking the challenge to the Merit Systems Protection Board, according to the government filing.
“Roughly six weeks after the Fifth Circuit issued its decision, the president revoked the executive order at issue in this case as part of a broader wind-down of COVID-19 emergency policies based on changed public health conditions,” according to the government filing.
At issue is whether the Supreme Court “should vacate the court of appeals’ judgment and remand with instructions to direct the district court to vacate its order granting a preliminary injunction as moot,” according to the White House filing.
Feds for Medical Freedom filed a challenge to executive order 14043 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas in December 2021. The order called for vaccination against COVID-19 by federal workers unless they qualified for certain medical or religious exemptions. Biden lifted the executive order in May.
The legal filing says the president lifted the order because of dramatically reduced hospitalization and fatality rates from the illness that claimed the lives of more than one million Americans. “The decision would have warranted review” if the order had not been lifted given the improved national health data, according to the petition.
The White House filing also said the Fifth Circuit failed to really explain the reasoning for keeping the national injunction in place.
The Supreme Court receives more than 7,000 petitions each year to hear cases but actually takes less than 100 of those, according to a Supreme Court fact sheet.
