How Outrage over Vaccine Mandates Became a Mainstream GOP Stance | Hacker News Reader

How Outrage over Vaccine Mandates Became a Mainstream GOP Stance

nytimes.com

5 pointswarning2610 comments

PSA: Unlike the soundly unconstitutional measures that followed 9/11 (eg:bulk warrantless surveillance), Covid measures sunset.

That is all. Thank you for your attention.

The patriot act kept being extended until new laws finally came along. According to Wikipedia

> It contains many sunset provisions beginning December 31, 2005, approximately four years after its passage. Before the sunset date, an extension was passed for four years which kept most of the law intact. In May 2011, President Barack Obama signed the PATRIOT Sunset Extensions Act of 2011, which extended three provisions.[3] These provisions were modified and extended until 2019 by the USA Freedom Act, passed in 2015.[4] In 2020, efforts to extend the provisions were not passed by the House of Representatives.[5]

Biden's vaccine mandate on large private employers is really an attempt to mandate that individuals be vaccinated. Otherwise the mandate might apply only to workplaces where many workers gather, not to large companies where people are currently working from home. Even many Republicans who think the vaccines are effective do not believe the Federal government has the authority to mandate that individuals be vaccinated. A sample of their reasoning is here: https://nypost.com/2021/09/10/biden-knows-his-vax-mandates-a... .

Yeah, I'm at least on the edge of that camp. I want people to get vaccinated. I consider the arguments against to mostly be ridiculous. But I don't want the Federal government to tear up the Constitution to force people to get the vaccine.

Genuine question: what’s the constitutional difference between the mandate for children to be vaccinated in order to attend school (which I presume has continued even with a shift to far more remote schooling), and the new presidential mandate?

If I understand correctly, the school vaccine mandate didn't come from the federal government. It comes from local school boards.

Foolish me, I expect the Federal government to operate within the limits of the US Constitution. I see it already beyond those, and I resent and oppose every additional step it tries to take further outside those limits.

But maybe I'm just rationalizing the difference...

I live the US but did not go through the US school system — it was truly a genuine and sincere question. It does appear to be a state or even more local requirement, which is definitely different.

> Foolish me, I expect the Federal government to operate within the limits of the US Constitution.

Now agreed, it’s different from the school mandate(s), but I still don’t yet understand this derisive leap to claims of unconstitutionality. OSHA legislation is broad in the responsibilities of employers, and one can make an argument (the quality of which I won’t inflate) that executive orders can be used to enforce that in this way. Certainly it seems to track with the frankly enormous executive power that the last 4 presidents, current included, have made ample use of. At least that executive power is mostly time-limited, given term limits.

And at least in theory, questions of bodily autonomy seem to have been side-stepped with the “or test weekly” provision, however impractical that may be for many.

States are in charge of vaccination requirements for children. This needs to be a state issue, so that people can move, unless you want civil war.

There probably isn’t a constitutional difference, but it depends on whether you care about the original text of the constitution or the precedence set by prior SCOTUS cases. Jacobson (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobson_v._Massachusetts) set a precedent that the state (meaning government in general and not just a state-level government) has some powers that supersede individual liberty, including vaccination to protect public health, and this precedence has been used to force collectivist decision making in other situations as well. However the ninth amendment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ninth_Amendment_to_the_United_...) explicitly gives individuals all liberties not discussed by the constitution and would therefore suggest that individual liberty is supreme even in the case of bodily autonomy.

Leaving that debate aside however, I think it’s important to recognize that the US is built on federalism. It is less of a unified monolithic nation and more of a diverse set of nations that share a small set of common services like the military. Over time the federal government has become bloated and powerful, and has been erasing the locality of choice that state and local jurisdictions are supposed to provide. This leads to situations like the national vaccine mandate, where a narrow majority can implement a tyranny over the rest (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tyranny_of_the_majority), when the system is meant to allow greater local liberty and independence over such choices. If this type of governance continues I expect as some point the US will break up.

Let’s separate the debate around vaccine mandates from vaccine resistance and other related debates (like doubts about its efficacy and safety). Is outrage over vaccine mandates really a “GOP stance”? I am pro vaccine but am also for bodily autonomy and am not a Republican. I feel any land that values civil liberties must, as a principle, uphold the slogan “my body my choice”, whether we are talking about abortion rights or vaccines. I feel it is illogical to expect one person to undergo a forced medical procedure so others can have a risk condition they like, when others can reduce their own exposure by skipping activities in public or by wearing protective suits. It makes even less sense when you consider that COVID has a low infection fatality rate and vaccines offer an imperfect degree of protection. A vaccine mandate is essentially arguing that one low-risk condition that is marginally better than another low-risk condition necessitates a breach of bodily autonomy. Consider as well that until this year, prominent civil liberties groups like ACLU were against vaccine mandates because they considered bodily autonomy a fundamental civil liberty and constitutional right. Also vaccine mandates have been so unpopular that until two days ago, the current administration was very consistently against vaccine mandates (https://reason.com/2021/09/09/joe-biden-vaccine-mandate-wale...) but betrayed expectations the public had of them with the new sweeping mandates.

Taken all together, I am quite perplexed as to why there isn’t more universal outrage over vaccine mandates.

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