After reading about Friday's Supreme Court hearing the power of federal agencies to impose far-reaching vaccine mandates, a friend asked me how Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor could be so completely ignorant about COVID.  The snarky answer was that the "Wise Latina" was drawing on her inner wisdom, obviating the need for facts.  However, given that Justices Breyer and Kagan were just as ill-informed, and all three were pushing to define public policy rather than analyze the Constitution, the accurate answer is that leftist Supreme Court justices care nothing about the law.  They view themselves as an unelected legislature and are guided by their personal fears.

The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in two mandate cases.  The first, National Federation of Independent Business v. OSHA, challenged the latter's "emergency" mandate requiring all businesses with 100 employees or more to force the employees to vaccinate or take regular cost-prohibitive tests, something affecting over 80 million Americans.  The plaintiffs argued (correctly) that OSHA lacks the authority to mandate medicines for employees.  Forcing people either to get a jab or test or to lose their job is a far cry from requiring hard hats and machine shut-offs.

The second case, Biden v. Missouri, was one of several lawsuits that Republican attorneys general filed challenging the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services' mandate holding that all health care facility workers have to be vaccinated.  Failing to do so would forfeit Medicare and Medicaid benefits that are the life's blood for most doctors' offices and medical facilities (which also explains why physicians routinely refuse requests for ivermectin or other alternative COVID treatments).  The states contend that a federal agency lacks the authority to condition participation in those programs on complying with mandates.

Ultimately, the arguments in both cases boil down to one pivotal point: does the Constitution give agencies the authority to write laws — such as laws disguised as regulations that force American workers to get experimental, controversial, minimally effective, life-altering treatments?  The easy answer is "no," but the Supreme Court's leftists were uninterested in a constitutional analysis of bureaucratic overreach.  Instead, they asked questions premised on their ill-informed beliefs about COVID and their obvious personal fears.

Image: Supreme Court justices (edited in befunky).  Fox News screen grab.

Kagan began by insisting that "it's an extraordinary use of power taking place in an extraordinary situation," and that "we all know what the best policy is, we know the best way to stop spread is for people to get vaccinated and to stop serious illness is for people to get vaccinated," and that "the second best is to wear masks."  (All Supreme Court quotations are from Fox News's live coverage.)

No, Justice Kagan, we don't all know that.  That's Congress's job.  Additionally, the CDC has admitted that vaccinations do nothing to stop COVID's spread.  Indeed, with omicron, they seem to make people more vulnerable:

A study found that 96% of all omicron cases in Germany were among the vaccinated. Similarly, cases of omicron among the vaccinated in Ontario, Canada, are outpacing cases among the unvaccinated by 28%. The same trend is occurring in Denmark, where 8.5% of all cases are among the unvaccinated, and in the United Kingdom, only 25% of omicron hospitalizations are among the unvaccinated.

Also, Democrats are admitting that the cloth masks people have worn for almost two years are useless.  Now it's all about N-95 masks (which also don't work because [a] nobody wears them correctly and [b] everybody wears them repeatedly, which just recycles viruses and other nasties around people's noses and mouths).  Lloyd Austin, who had three jabs and walks around like Darth Vader...caught COVID.

Most importantly, "policy" is not Kagan's business.  Her only responsibility is to determine whether federal agencies can make laws.  (And again, no, they can't.)

Breyer was just as ignorant, claiming that "you have hospitalization figures growing by factors by [sic] 10, you have hospitalizations near the record, at the record."  Again, untrue.  In fact, the current variant is seeing lower hospitalization rates than other variants, which is to be expected as viruses learn to live symbiotically with their human hosts.  Indeed, in New York, almost half of all ostensible COVID hospitalizations are not for COVID.

However, in the stupidity sweepstakes, Sotomayor always wins: "We have over 100,000 children, which we've never had before, in serious condition and many on ventilators."

Not true.  As Fauci reluctantly conceded, there's a huge difference between children hospitalized because of COVID versus testing positive for it upon admission for a different health issue.  There's a rise in hospitalizations only because omicron is unstoppable and it's peaking now.  Even the New York Times concedes that children are not at greater risk.  Also, because more people die in the winter for myriad reasons, including the annual flu season, hospitals always fill up around this time.  (It doesn't help that hospitals are short-staffed thanks to mandates.)

Breyer is 83, Sotomayor is 67 and has diabetes, and Kagan is a youngish 61.  The first two, and probably Kagan as well, consider themselves at high risk from COVID, and, of course, they wallow in ignorance.  They've made it plain that, to protect themselves, they're willing to ignore the Constitution; make policy from the bench; and, along the way, destroy America.

Bonus content: The Missouri attorney general, making complete sense:

https://t.co/Ar7Ac1wkIq

— Bookwormroom (@Bookwormroom) January 8, 2022