WASHINGTON, D.C. – Yesterday, Congressman Jason Smith issued the following statement blasting the Biden Administration after the Occupational Safety and Health Administration at the Department of Labor and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services announced “emergency” rules forcing private companies to enforce a COVID-19 vaccine mandate.
“These unconstitutional, authoritarian federal vaccine mandates sicken me to my core. Working class Americans who kept on the job throughout the pandemic to produce the goods everyone needed to survive are now being told they will lose their livelihood if they don’t sacrifice their medical freedom,” said Rep. Jason Smith. “I promise Missourians I will fight for your life and liberty against the Washington politicians and bureaucrats who think so little of you that they would sacrifice the freedoms we all hold dear. This fight is nowhere near over. It’s just getting started.”
The OSHA rule will affect 84 million Americans by requiring employers of 100 employees or more to require their employees to be vaccinated or to submit to weekly testing and wear masks at work. Under the CMS rule which will affect 17 million Americans, healthcare workers are required to be fully vaccinated or risk termination. There is no testing alternative and health clinics face losing access to Medicare and Medicaid for non-compliance. Businesses found out of compliance with the mandate could face hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines. Despite the massive economic implications of this sweeping mandate, the rule was drafted in a mere five weeks.
These mandates come on top of the mandates for federal employees and federal contractors to be vaccinated, which require vaccination by November 22 and December 8, respectively.
“Joe Biden’s impatience will make every economic crisis we have in this country – like the supply chain crisis, the inflation crisis, and the worker shortage crisis – worse, and it is totally avoidable,” said Rep. Jason Smith. “Joe Biden’s top priority should be getting our economy back on track, not forcing people to bend the knee to his agenda.”
Recently, House Budget Committee Republican Leader Jason Smith and House Oversight and Reform Committee Republican Leader James Comer sent a letter to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) over the Biden Administration’s efforts to shortchange the federal rulemaking process in order to impose a national vaccine mandate on employers and called on the OMB Acting Director to immediately withdraw the rule.
Read the full letter to OMB here.
Congressman Smith is a co-author of two pieces of legislation – the Freedom from Mandates Act and the Health Freedom for All Act, which would prevent this rule from going into effect.