The Supreme Court heard oral argument on Friday morning in the two cases involving Biden Covid vaccine mandates — the OSHA mandate on all private business with 100 or more employees, and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) mandate on health-care workers who participate in Medicaid and Medicare programs. I wrote a preview on the cases earlier this week — here.
The arguments went on for about three and a half hours. Justice Sotomayor is quite justifiably catching flak over some absurd misstatements of fact (our Zachary Evans reports on her claim that 100,000 children are in “serious condition” medically due to Covid — currently, HHS says 3,342 are hospitalized). Still, as Rich and I discussed when we recorded the podcast early Friday afternoon, if your idea of how the U.S. government works was formulated based just on this week, you would have been relieved at the seriousness, competence, and high-mindedness exhibited by the litigants and the justices, if all you otherwise had to go on was the January 6 rhetoric pouring out of Capitol Hill, the White House, and Mar-a-Lago.
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