President Biden’s chief of staff, Ron Klain, gave up the administration’s game by endorsing a tweet from MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle:
“OSHA doing this vaxx mandate as an emergency workplace safety rule is the ultimate work-around for the Federal govt to require vaccinations.”
So as with other things — such as the federal eviction moratorium — Biden knows his actions are unconstitutional. He’ll just try to do it anyway with loopholes and gambles that by the time the case winds its way through the courts, it won’t matter.
It’s all so performative and cynical.
Biden isn’t playing to the unvaccinated, who are even less likely to get the shot after being lectured to and insulted by the president.
It’s for smug Democrats who appreciate him lecturing and insulting those people, dividing the nation even more.
Biden could have tried compassion and empathy instead of anger and hectoring. Instead, after his mismanagement of everything from the border to the economy, Biden is trying to lay claim to some moral high ground. Look at those GOP governors, they are “cavalier” with life, he claimed Friday.
Not as cavalier as Biden was with the 13 service members who died as a result of the president’s disastrous Afghanistan withdrawal, or how cavalier he’s being with the American lives he’s left behind there.
Nor as cavalier as Biden is with his own beliefs: In the last year he has both cast doubt over the efficacy of vaccines (because Trump was still in charge) and vowed he doesn’t believe in vaccine mandates, then reversed himself on both.
But these GOP governors and other opponents of Biden’s dubious mandates do care — about the higher principles the president would trample over.
The vaccine orders are just the latest Democratic Party maneuver to federalize our lives, the Constitution be damned. Election law, abortion, education — all must be dictated by a tiny Democratic majority in Washington, and if that fails, well, there are “work-arounds.”
The Post has campaigned for vaccinations. They work. They are getting us back to normal, even as Democratic governors and mayors keep trying to move the goalposts.
But high-handed contempt for 80 million Americans, while violating laws and norms, is not the answer. Democrats wonder why Biden’s approval rating is plummeting, and 69 percent of those polled say things are going badly in the country. This is why.