RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/biden-suffers-string-of-court-setbacks-as-administration-s-vaccine-mandates-are-put-on-hold/ar-AARjmcV

The Biden administration has suffered three major court losses since Monday morning, with orders freezing key federal government Covid-19 vaccine rules in certain parts of the country and, in one case, nationwide.

The latest blow came from a federal judge in Louisiana, whose order Tuesday afternoon halted across the country the administration’s mandate requiring that certain health care workers be vaccinated.

The order in the Louisiana case was delivered a day after the administration’s health care worker mandate had been blocked in 10 states by a federal judge overseeing a separate challenge filed in Missouri. And it came just hours after a separate Biden vaccine rule — aimed at federal contractors — had been put on hold in three states by a federal judge in Kentucky.

Meanwhile, a requirement that employees of larger companies get either vaccinated or tested for Covid-19 regularly remains frozen after a scathing appeals court order blocking the mandate earlier this month.

The administration has acted quickly to seek reversals of the orders blocking its vaccine rules.

“That threat to human life and health far exceeds the potential indirect harms to patients resulting from workers who may quit rather than receive the vaccine,” the Justice Department said in one such filing Tuesday, asking for an appeals court to reinstate the mandate that covers certain health care staff at providers that participate in Medicare and Medicaid.

Claims of an ‘erosion of our liberties’

The challenges put forward different arguments for why each vaccine requirement should be blocked, touching on the administration’s compliance with administrative law to constitutional claims about the federal government’s abilities to regulate vaccine participation.

In the Kentucky case concerning the mandate for federal contractors, US District Judge Gregory Frederick Van Tatenhove said Tuesday that the question before him was “narrow.”

https://thefederalist.com/2021/12/01/if-you-dont-know-what-time-it-is-get-out-of-politics-now/

The defining political question of our time is this: “Do you know what time it is?”

The line, popularized by the Claremont Institute’s David Reaboi, succinctly captures the most essential of points: If you don’t understand the stakes, and how fraught the situation is — that the ruling class seeks total power, is closing in on it, and will stop at nothing to achieve it — you are unfit to lead. You ought to exit the playing field.

Knowing what time it is leads one to prioritize different ends and to pursue them using different means. Among those on the right, although more so in the chattering class than among activists, there appears to be a divide over the stakes inadvertently elucidated in some of the recent debates over national conservatism.

In the Wall Street Journal, Chris DeMuth and Matthew Continetti jousted over it. Continetti took issue with DeMuth’s argument endorsing national conservatism in part by claiming essentially that the movement captured so many schools of thought as to be incoherent, and that he favored his “conservatism without modification — constitutionalist, market-oriented and unapologetically American.”

I laid out what it is that unites national conservatives in a recent piece here at The Federalist — noting that a shared understanding of the stakes is inherent to the movement.

The idea that conservatism needs no modifier becomes questionable if conservatism — which has in many quarters focused on economic liberalism while ceding most everything else — is not conserving or doing everything it can to restore what it ought to in the face of a ruling class onslaught.