CNN Legal Expert: Biden Administration ‘Almost Certainly’ Can Institute Nationwide Vaccine Mandate
CNN Senior Legal Analyst Elie Honig said that President Joe Biden’s administration “almost certainly” has the authority to institute a nationwide coronavirus vaccine mandate.
On Tuesday morning’s edition of New Day, co-anchor Brianna Keilar hosted Honig for a segment devoted to the legalities surrounding Covid policies, from both public and private institutions.
On the question of individual states mandating the vaccine, Honig cited the 1905 Jacobson v. Massachusetts case, and said “No state has done this yet, but legally they absolutely can.”
“What about Federal government? Can the federal government issue a nationwide vaccine mandate?” Keilar asked.
“Yeah, so the answer is almost certainly yes,” Honig replied without hesitation.
“Now again, there are politics behind this,” Honig continued. “The CDC Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky last week said that the Biden administration was looking into a federal vaccine mandate. Then she walked it back, ran it back really quickly, and said ‘There will be no federal mandate.'”
Honig said that the same logic in the Jacobson decision applies to the federal government, and added that “there is a specific federal regulation that gives the federal government for the department of health and human services to ‘make and enforce regulations necessary to prevent the introduction, transmission, or spread of communicable diseases.’ Covid certainly would seem to fit squarely within that law.”
The subject of this authority has come up several times recently. The president himself raised eyebrows when he said that the authority to mandate vaccines nationwide is “still a question,” but White House COVID-19 Response Coordinator Jeff Zients shut down speculation by saying “That’s not an authority that we’re exploring at all.”
Then, as Honig described, Walensky similarly said that a federal mandate was “something that I think the administration is looking into,” then later clarified “There will be no nationwide mandate. I was referring to mandates by private institutions and portions of the federal government. There will be no federal mandate.”
However, neither Dr. Walensky nor Zients flat-out said that the administration hasn’t asked about or gotten legal guidance from the Department of Justice on the question, and neither did Principal Deputy White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre when she was asked, point-blank, “has he asked the Justice Department to see if it’s even possible?”
“I don’t have any more to add to that,” was KJP’s response.
As Honig noted, politics play a role, and what his analysis doesn’t cover is the current 6-3 conservtive majority on the Supreme Court, a wild card that could greatly complicate any effort to put a nationwide mandate in place. And announcing the results/existence of a DoJ review into that authority, absent an intention to use it immediately, carries the risk of hardening anti-vaccination resolve.
Watch above via CNN.
