David Cortman, senior counsel and vice president of U.S. litigation with Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), says his organization will take legal action if the Biden administration follows through on this "executive overreach."
President Joe Biden announced the rule in September during a nationally televised address.
"The Department of Labor is developing an emergency rule to require all employers with 100 or more employees, that together employ over 80 million workers, to ensure their workforces are fully vaccinated or show a negative test at least once a week," said Biden. "Some of the biggest companies are already requiring this."
The Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) will be the government office enforcing this rule from the Department of Labor. Cortman believes this exceeds OSHA's and the Department of Labor's authority.
He also says the option for people to show a negative test on a regular basis instead of getting a COVID shot poses a burden on employers.
"Imagine hundreds of employees and the burden of record keeping, enforcement, tracking, expense," Cortman poses. "How much time will be taken away from the work itself just to follow up on hundreds of employees and weekly testing?"
He says there is a reason why a federal nationwide vaccine mandate has never been done America.
"These emergency temporary standards have rarely been used," notes Cortman. "When they have, they've often been struck down because they bypassed the normal process that such regulations have to go through."
So the ADF legal counsel predicts there will be "quite a few legal problems if this passes and the president does decide to go ahead with his overreach."
