RUTHFULLY YOURS

The bewildering array of false statements offered by the three left-leaning Supreme Court justices at the special Jan. 7 hearing on President Joe Biden’s unprecedented vaccination diktats for private-sector and health care workers is now a matter of public record.

It took just a few hours of people tuning into the live broadcast of oral arguments to open a window into why the federal government – filled as it is with ignoramuses, posterior-osculators, charlatans, and grifters – doesn’t work.

All across social media Americans quite properly ridiculed Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Stephen Breyer, and Elena Kagan for their fear porn and astonishing ignorance about COVID-19, as if these jurists got all their news from the professional misinformers at the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, and MSNBC.

Sometimes it seemed like the liberal law lords got their professional degrees from arguing on social media comment threads as they amplified COVID-19 hysteria.

The at-times abysmal quality of the justices’ colloquys prompted the satirical Babylon Bee to publish a piece titled “Nation’s Fate Now In The Hands Of 8 Dummies And Clarence Thomas.”

Hyperbolic? A little, maybe.

At issue in the rare Friday sitting of the Supreme Court was the Biden administration’s attempt to ram through without the consent of Congress a mandate forcing employers with at least 100 employees – or most of America’s private workforce – to require their employees to receive the still-experimental vaccines aimed at preventing COVID-19 or to endure the inconvenience of regular testing to detect it. That affects about 84 million people. (The transcript of the oral argument in NFIB v. Department of Labor may be found here.)

Also at issue was the emergency regulation –halted by lower courts— compelling the vaccination of more than 10 million employees at health care facilities that take part in Medicare and Medicaid. (The transcript of the oral argument in Biden v. Missouri may be found here.)

The most radical member of the court, the “wise Latina,” Sonia Sotomayor, also turns out to be the most radically misinformed about the Chinese plague.

Sotomayor’s resistance to reality makes her the “ideal” Supreme Court justice to the Left, Dinesh D’Souza tweeted the day after the arguments:

“Sotomayor is, from the Left’s point of view, the ideal #SCOTUS justice: she’s indifferent to the text of the Constitution, unfettered by facts, a militant activist who has no qualms about twisting and bending the law to achieve the ideological result.”

D’Souza also called her a “petulant crank” in December, which sounds about right.

Sotomayor insisted the private-sector mandate was necessary because the “Omicron [variant] is as deadly and causes as much serious disease in the unvaccinated as Delta did … we have hospitals that are almost at full capacity with people severely ill on ventilators. We have over 100,000 children, which we’ve never had before … in serious condition and many on ventilators.”

In fact, Omicron is considered less severe than Delta and federal data show there had been only “3,342 confirmed pediatric hospitalizations with COVID-19 across the US as of Friday — making the justice’s math off by a factor of nearly 30,” the New York Post noted.

The 100,000 figure is so egregiously wrong that even the leftists at the Washington Post and PolitiFact felt they had to shiv Sotomayor. WaPo awarded her statement “Four Pinocchios” and PolitiFact rated it “False.”

CDC boss Dr. Rochelle Walensky piled on, telling Fox News there were actually fewer than 3,500 children hospitalized with the virus.

Yet Twitter, which routinely banishes users for spreading what it deems COVID-19 misinformation, refuses to ban the statement by Sotomayor, who was appointed by then-President Barack Hussein Obama in 2009.

Sotomayor also appears to have missed a few lectures in law school about the Constitution and basic legal concepts.

The justice said “I’m not sure I understand the distinction why the states would have the power” to enact something like Biden’s private-sector mandate “but the federal government wouldn’t.”

Answer: the police powers in the various state constitutions and in the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which states that “powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

These police powers, to use constitutional parlance, include the ability to regulate the health, safety, and morals of the population.

But Sotomayor cut off Ohio Solicitor General Benjamin Flowers after he said “the federal government has no police power.”

She insisted the federal government has “power with respect to protecting the health and safety of workers.”

“We have accept[ed] the constitutionality of OSHA,” she said, adding that the federal government has “a police power to protect workers.”

Sotomayor scolded National Federation of Independent Business attorney Scott Keller, telling him: “You forget that there are certain states now that are stopping employers from requiring vaccines. There are certain states stopping employers from requiring masks. Why shouldn’t the federal government, which it has already decided in OSHA, to give — Congress has decided to give OSHA the power to regulate workplace safety, have a national rule that will protect workers?”

Keller replied that “Congress would have to clearly state in a statute if it wanted to give an occupational health agency the power to require employees to get certain medical treatment.” Congress did not tell OSHA “you now have statutory authority to regulate all communicable diseases.”

OSHA has regulated bloodborne pathogens, he said, referring to when the agency required employers to protect employees from occupational exposure to infectious agents. But “even that rule did not mandate vaccines or widespread testing.”

Justice Neil Gorsuch later offered some nuanced constitutional clarity that no doubt went over Sotomayor’s head.

“I think we’ve all kind of come to the point where we all agree that states … have a wide police power under our constitutional system that Congress has to regulate consistent with the Commerce Clause … and make the major decisions while agencies can do the work that Congress has given them to do but not other kinds of work,” the justice told Flowers.

“And the major questions doctrine kind of regulates that interaction between Congress and agencies,” he said, meaning that Congress is supposed to make laws about major issues, instead of delegating its decision-making powers to federal agencies.

“So it’s not that judges are supposed to decide some question of public health,” Gorsuch said. “It’s about regulating the rules of the system to ensure that the appropriate party does.”

Sotomayor also suggested that human workers could be regulated through the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) like machines or toxic chemicals.

The justice asked NFIB’s Keller: “So what’s the difference between this and telling employers, where sparks are flying in the workplace, your workers have to … wear a mask?”

Keller replied: “When sparks are flying in the workplace, that’s presumably because there’s a machine that’s unique to that workplace.”

Sotomayor interjected, saying: “Why is the human being not like a machine if it’s spewing a virus, bloodborne viruses?”

Yes, she actually said that.

Sotomayor also doesn’t know what the word “mandate” means.

Sotomayor interjected again when Keller said the OSHA mandate was invalid because “Congress would have to clearly state in a statute if it wanted to give an occupational health agency the power to require employees to get certain medical treatment …”

“There’s no requirement here. It’s not a vaccine mandate. It’s something totally different.”

In fact, a mandate is something a government requires a person or entity to do. For example, the individual mandate in the Obamacare statute required individuals to purchase health insurance, or face a penalty for failing to do so.

The OSHA mandate requires employers to create a vaccine-and-testing regime, but the justice  seemed to think the mandate is not really a mandate because an employee can opt to be tested weekly instead of getting the shot.

But Sotomayor is more Humpty Dumpty than jurist because when she uses a word it means just what she chooses it to mean – neither more nor less.

So somehow Sotomayor reasons that this mandate isn’t a mandate.

Stephen Breyer, who is 83 and under intense pressure from the Left to retire to give Biden a chance to replace him with another, younger liberal justice to carry on the important work of undermining the republic over coming decades, said there were “750 million new cases yesterday or close to that is a lot.”

“That’s why I said I would find it … unbelievable that it could be in the public interest to suddenly stop these vaccinations,” said Breyer who was appointed in 1994 by then-President Bill Clinton.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the current total U.S. population is only 332.4 million.

Breyer also claimed that the nation’s hospitals were “full almost to the point of the maximum,” a statement that doesn’t even remotely approximate the truth.

Of the 714,247 inpatient beds in 5,607 hospitals reporting, 555,883 were in use as of Jan. 11, which means only 77.8 percent of the beds were occupied, according to data provided by the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services. Only 145,982 of inpatient beds were in use for COVID-19.

After U.S. Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar, a former Miss Idaho 2004, laid out the upcoming timeline for enforcing the OSHA mandate, Breyer jumped in, implying vaccinations are 100 percent effective in stopping COVID-19.

“So if we delay that one day — maybe I’m wrong, and please tell me if I am — but the numbers I read is when they issued this order, there were approximately 70-something-thousand new cases every day,” Breyer told Prelogar.

“And yesterday, there were close to 750,000. So if we delay it a day, if it were to have effect, then 750,000 more people will have COVID who otherwise, if we didn’t delay it, would not have.”

But even the CDC admits that vaccinations are not foolproof.

“COVID-19 vaccines are effective at preventing infection, serious illness, and death. Most people who get COVID-19 are unvaccinated. However, since vaccines are not 100% effective at preventing infection, some people who are fully vaccinated will still get COVID-19,” according to CDC’s website.

Elena Kagan, who was appointed by Obama in 2010, implied vaccinated people cannot spread SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes the disease COVID-19.

In a discussion of the health care worker mandate, Kagan said the government told health care providers, “the one thing you can’t do is to kill your patients, so you have … to get vaccinated so that you’re not transmitting the disease that can kill elderly Medicare patients, that can kill sick Medicaid patients. I mean, that seems like a pretty basic infection prevention measure. You can’t be the carrier of disease.”

Vaccination only reduces the risk of a person spreading COVID-19, the CDC acknowledges.

Kagan also claimed “the best way” to stop the spread of the virus is “for people to get vaccinated,” and the “second best way” is to “wear masks.”

“Neither claim is true,” Kaylee McGhee White writes at the Washington Examiner.

“While the vaccines appear to slow the spread of COVID-19 and reduce the chance of death, there is absolutely no evidence that they prevent transmission, especially not against the much more contagious omicron variant.”

Kagan, Breyer, and especially Sotomayor amply demonstrated at the recent hearing why they are unfit to serve on the Supreme Court.

Every day they remain on the bench America is in peril.