A court decision has morphed from a dispute over the mandate itself into a broader legal dispute over a President's powers. Image: Ringo Chiu/Shutterstock.com
With only a week left before the deadline for an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, the Biden administration still hasn’t indicated whether it will challenge a court’s ruling against its Coronavirus vaccination mandate for federal employees.
While that mandate has since been revoked, the decision by the full Fifth Circuit federal appeals court in March has morphed from a dispute over the mandate itself into a broader legal dispute. It has raised questions regarding the limits of a President’s powers over federal workers and under what circumstances federal employees can challenge policies directly in court.
The latter issue has arisen regarding several major policy disputes of recent years, including over the Trump administration’s executive orders on federal employee union rights and job protections.
In a divided ruling, the Fifth Circuit held that the group bringing the challenge, Feds for Medical Freedom, could go directly into federal court. That contradicted the rulings of at least two other federal circuits which had agreed with the Biden Justice Department that civil service law required review first by the MSPB. That is the type of conflict between federal judicial circuit courts that the high court often steps in to resolve, although it has discretion over whether to accept appeals.
For now, the case is before the district judge who issued a nationwide injunction against the vaccination mandate early last year just as agencies were about to begin disciplinary actions against employees not in compliance with it. Among the issues to be decided there is whether the case should be dismissed as moot, since the mandate has been revoked.
Meanwhile, the Feds for Medical Freedom group is continuing to file suits charging that even with the mandate not in effect, agencies took discriminatory actions against employees who hadn’t been vaccinated against the virus. It recently filed such suits against the Justice and Defense departments, following one filed earlier this year against the State Department.
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