The U.S. Supreme Court heard oral arguments Friday about the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandates for employers and federally-funded health providers, but whether it will strike them down remains a very open question…
Oral arguments did not clearly forecast how the Court will rule, but questioning fell largely along the justices’ expected leanings. Left-wing Justices Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor accepted the premises that the vaccines are effective and that the omicron variant is just as dangerous as previous forms of COVID, if not more so (evidence so far indicates it is not)…
Ultimately, it remains to be seen how the Court will rule. Despite some narrow victories for pro-life regulations, religious liberty, and other conservative causes, the current Supreme Court (often mischaracterized by both sides as a “conservative majority”) has also made a number of liberal decisions, most notoriously Gorsuch’s 2020 majority opinion redefining “sex discrimination” in Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to add sexual orientation and gender identity to its meaning (Kavanaugh voted with conservatives in that case, and Barrett was not yet on the court).
While Gorsuch has generally ruled more conservatively since then, Barrett and/or Kavanaugh have previously been the deciding votes against the Supreme Court taking up reviews of transgender restroom “accommodation” in Virginia, Title X funding of the abortion industry, a Catholic hospital’s right to refuse gender “transition” procedures, and Christian business owners’ right to refuse participation in same-sex ceremonies. Read more…