Earlier this week, a group of 13 Republican states were successful in their lawsuit against the Biden Administration challenging a provision in the President's "American Rescue Plan." As reported by the Washington Examiner:
U.S. District Judge L. Scott Coogler of the Northern District of Alabama issued an injunction against Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and in favor of more than a dozen states that enjoins her from enforcing the section of Biden’s $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan Act, enacted in March.
Part of the COVID-19 bill said that relief funding received by states cannot be used to offset tax cuts or credits “directly or indirectly.” The states had argued that the mandate violates the Constitution’s spending clause and the 10th Amendment. There were several other lawsuits filed by Republican states over the matter.
Coogler wrote that he agreed with the plaintiffs’ argument that “the language of the Tax Mandate makes it impossible for States to ‘make an informed choice’ about the costs of receiving ARPA funds because it is impossible to know how to exercise taxing authority without putting ARPA funds at risk.”
He pointed out that money is fungible, meaning it is an asset that is interchangeable. In the context of the tax mandate, it would not be possible to differentiate funds that were or were not used to offset tax cuts.
The states involved in the suit included West Virginia, Alabama, Arkansas, Alaska, Florida, Iowa, Kansas, Montana, New Hampshire, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, and Utah.
These states' victory was the second major win by Republican states in the last week. Last Friday, the Fifth Circuit affirmed its earlier stay of the Biden Administration's vaccine mandate for private businesses. The states of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, and Utah are party to that case, and several others have challenged the mandate in other jurisdictions.
National Review reported:
Their decision asserted that, in the name of addressing what it posits is an emergency health peril, the mandate wrongfully lumps every workplace and worker into the same category. In reality, the judges noted, there are various risk levels for COVID among different demographics.
“Rather than a delicately handled scalpel, the Mandate is a one-size-fits-all sledgehammer that makes hardly any attempt to account for differences in workplaces (and workers) that have more than a little bearing on workers’ varying degrees of susceptibility to the supposedly ‘grave danger’ the Mandate purports to address,” the judges wrote.
By making employers responsible for enforcement, the judges said that the mandate will inflict financial harm on private companies with over 100 employees, heavily penalizing entities that don’t comply and forcing them to dismiss significant numbers of their labor force to avoid these fines.
The judges added that “the Mandate imposes a financial burden upon them by deputizing their participation in OSHA’s regulatory scheme, exposes them to severe financial risk if they refuse or fail to comply, and threatens to decimate their workforces (and business prospects) by forcing unwilling employees to take their shots, take their tests, or hit the road.”
Today, OSHA announced that it had officially ceased implementation of the unconstitutional mandate.
🚨🚨🚨
— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) November 17, 2021
Biden’s lawless mandate suspended. https://t.co/VC8dql6u12
OSHA Suspends Implementation, Enforcement Of Biden’s Private Business Vaccine Rule Due To Court Order https://t.co/aAadSy5QHG
— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) November 17, 2021
Republican states are the first line of defense against President Joe Biden's massive overreach, and their lawsuits continue to show the unconstitutionality of the Administration's policies.