WASHINGTON – Today, Constitutional Accountability Center filed a brief with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in support of the U.S. Government’s motion to dissolve a stay of the vaccinate-or-test policy issued by the Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA).

CAC’s brief focuses, in part, on Founding-era practice, showing that the earliest Congresses routinely delegated power to executive department agencies to, among other things, enforce the nation’s first quarantine legislation in the wake of yellow fever outbreaks, administer the new government’s first direct tax, and manage the process of paying the national debt after the Revolutionary War.

“OSHA’s vaccinate-or-test policy is necessary to protect employees in America from the grave danger of COVID-19,” said CAC Chief Counsel Brianne Gorod. “The Fifth Circuit concluded that the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 would represent an unconstitutional delegation of legislative power if interpreted to authorize the OSHA policy. This argument has no grounding in the Constitution’s text and history, and presents a vision of the nondelegation doctrine that would—to use the words of a landmark Supreme Court case—‘cripple the government, and render it unequal to the object for which it is declared to be instituted.’”

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Resources:

CAC brief in In Re: OSHA Rule on COVID-19 Vaccination and Testing, 86 Fed. Reg. 61402: https://www.theusconstitution.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/OSHA-CAC-Brief-Final.pdf

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Constitutional Accountability Center is a think tank, public interest law firm, and action center dedicated to fulfilling the progressive promise of the Constitution’s text and history. Visit CAC’s website at www.theusconstitution.org.

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