Don’t look now, but the American brushfire ignited by Virginia voters last Tuesday has spread to Capitol Hill. With Democrat elites still reeling from a blue state’s repudiation of their incompetence and extremism, Senate Republicans are going on offense to protect working families from the woke Left’s next attack: Joe Biden’s national Covid vaccine mandate.
Biden’s order, finalized by the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, is not just an unconstitutional affront to individual liberty. It is a torpedo aimed straight at a U.S. economy already poisoned by Biden’s runaway inflation, and just as we head into the holiday spending season.
The unprecedented mandate would force private businesses with more than 100 employees to require their workers to get vaccinated, or submit to weekly Covid tests. Businesses who defy Biden will be bankrupted by federal fines. Workers who defy it will be fired.
The ripple effects will be more like tidal waves. The shipping industry is already in crisis. Supply chains have broken down, domestically and internationally. When this mandate takes effect, countless merchant fleet personnel, longshoremen, truckers, and warehouse workers will quit their jobs in protest of Biden’s tyranny – utterly crippling our already hobbled economy.
If Biden’s vaccine mandate goes into effect, it will plunge us into a recession from which it will take years to recover. Americans face a binary choice, then: submit to Biden’s unconstitutional, unscientific, sneering tyranny, or fight for the freedom God gave us and the Founders guaranteed to us. The stakes could not be higher.
And for the first time in a long time, congressional Republicans are ready.
Historically, of course, this has been the kind of fight Washington Republicans might try to duck – too hard… too controversial… too decisive.
But not this time.
Stirred to action by the American people’s election-night defiance of our corrupt, woke elite, conservatives in the Senate and House of Representatives have already affixed bayonets and are marching to the sound of the guns.
Within hours of OSHA publishing its vaccine mandate rule, U.S. Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) had 42 Republican cosponsors for a joint resolution to rescind the order. Under Braun’s resolution, nine more votes – eight Republicans and any Democrat – would kill Biden’s vaccine mandate before it could even be implemented.
But in truth, conservatives don’t even need any more votes. That’s what makes Republicans’ strategy so smart here. Not only is this one of the most important fights of 2021 – it is also winnable, even with Republicans in the minority.
Soon after Braun started circulating his resolution, U.S. Sen. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.) sent a letter, signed by nine colleagues, to Senate Democrat Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.), upping the ante. In the letter, Marshall and his cosigners declared:
“we will not support — and will use all means at our disposal to oppose — legislation that funds or in any way enables the enforcement of President Biden’s employer vaccine mandate.”
This could be check mate.
Under Biden’s new rule, OSHA will not start enforcing his vaccine mandate until January 4. But thanks to Democrats’ past budget bumbling, federal funding is already set to expire on December 4.
That means Congress will have to pass new funding bills – for OSHA and the rest of the federal government – before the vaccine mandate takes effect. And for those bills to pass, Democrats will need Republicans to vote for it.
The leverage Republicans now have over federal spending means that even if they cannot rescind the vaccine mandate, they can defund it. And by all accounts, they are seizing that opportunity.
More than 11 other Republican Senators have already signed onto Sen. Marshall’s letter. Sen. Braun is working to get more of his colleagues on his resolution, too. While Democrats dither behind closed doors, as their public support collapses, congressional Republicans are out-hustling, out-thinking, and out-fighting them.
Usually, when conservatives around the country are urged to call their senators and representatives, it’s to complain or pressure them. This week, though, all Americans have reason to call and email Republican members of Congress and encourage them. They are finally exercising the muscles of courage and leadership they will need to win this fight against the anti-American woke elites.
Republicans are slowly learning that when they stick to principle, and to each other, they really can start to make America great again.