WASHINGTON — The Occupational Safety and Health Administration’s attempt to impose an invasive “vaccinate-or-test” requirement on over half the nation’s workforce is an unprecedented and unconstitutional exercise of legislative power, which the Constitution vests solely in Congress, the nonprofit New Civil Liberties Alliance said in a news release.
In an amicus brief filed recently, the NCLA argued that the Sixth Circuit should maintain the stay issued in the Fifth Circuit against enforcement of OSHA’s Emergency Temporary Standard. NCLA had supported the stay in a previous brief.
NCLA’s recent brief reminded the court that an executive agency may not issue regulations to resolve “major questions” of economic and political significance, according to the news release.
“Even if Congress had explicitly delegated such authority to OSHA, which it did not, Congress still must provide intelligible principles for the agency to follow,” the NCLA said in the news release. “Otherwise, the executive agency would be exercising legislative power vested solely in Congress, which violates citizens’ right to be subject only to laws enacted by their elected representatives. But here the court does not even need to reach the intelligible-principle inquiry, because the lack of any purported delegation of statutory authority for OSHA’s action is blatant.”