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WASHINGTON (LifeSiteNews) — Two conservative Supreme Court justices wrote scathing dissenting opinions eviscerating the 5-4 decision in Biden v. Missouri, which allowed the federal government to impose a universal mandate for workers in facilities that receive Medicaid and Medicare funding to take the experimental COVID-19 shot.

Justice Clarence Thomas and Justice Samuel Alito (who were appointed by Presidents George H. W. Bush and George W. Bush, respectively) each wrote a dissent, in which the minority’s three other justices joined.

The lawsuit’s outcome hinged on convincing the high court that a constellation of disparate regulations pertaining to Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) actually held within them the authority to order a sweeping, nationwide vaccine mandate.

“The support for the argument that the Federal Government possesses such authority is so obscure that the main argument now pressed by the Government — that the authority is conferred by a hodgepodge of scattered provisions — was not prominently set out by the Government until its reply brief in this Court,” wrote Alito. “Before concluding that the Federal Government possesses this authority, we should demand stronger statutory proof than has been mustered to date.”

The Biden administration argued that its authority to mandate vaccines for all CMS workers is indeed contained in a select scattering of very short phrases. “Health and safety” and “infection control program” are two examples. Taken from dissimilar agency regulations, these phrases were then construed to mean what the administration wanted them to mean — namely that they are, in fact, evidence of its ability to enact a vaccine mandate.

“Contrary to the Government’s position, this kind of catchall provision does not authorize every regulation related to ‘health and safety,’” Thomas explained with respect to one of the particular phrases. “As with all statutory language, context must inform the scope of the provision.”

Thomas noted that court precedent dating to 1878 requires that the statutes must be read in a specific rather than generalized way, lest they presume more authority than they were designed to contain: “[When] a more general term follows more specific terms in a list, the general term is usually understood to embrace only objects similar in nature to those objects enumerated by the preceding specific words.”

“The Government has not made a strong showing that this hodgepodge of provisions authorizes a nationwide vaccine mandate,” Thomas said. “We presume that Congress does not hide ‘fundamental details of a regulatory scheme in vague or ancillary provisions.’”

“Yet here, the Government proposes to find virtually unlimited vaccination power, over millions of healthcare workers, in definitional provisions, a saving clause, and a provision regarding long-term care facilities’ sanitation procedures.”

Thomas also argued that the authority to issue a vaccine mandate “falls squarely within the state’s police power” and that Congress would have specifically articulated such a massive delegation of power had it meant to assign it to a government bureaucracy, rather than leave it implied.

“If Congress had wanted to grant CMS authority to impose a nationwide vaccine mandate, and consequently alter the state-federal balance, it would have said so clearly,” Thomas wrote. “It did not.”

Alito accentuated this point at length in his dissent, highlighting that both Congress and legal precedent have created a strict framework that must be followed when un-elected bureaucracies seek to burden the populace with novel regulations. He outlined how the CMS failed to comply with this process on multiple counts and how it demonstrated little to no justification for its actions.

With its decision “the Court rewards this extraordinary departure from ordinary principles of administrative procedure,” said Alito. “Neither CMS nor the Court articulates a limiting principle for why, after an unexplained and unjustified delay, an agency can regulate first and listen later, and then put more than 10 million healthcare workers to the choice of their jobs or an irreversible medical treatment.”

Both of the dissents confined their analysis as to how the Biden administration was inappropriately outside the legal framework to issue a vaccine mandate with the regulations it invoked. Neither Thomas nor Alito discussed the experimental nature of the abortion-tainted COVID-19 inoculations or examined the increasing amount of troubling data showing how the injections are harmful and potentially lethal.

In addition to Thomas and Alito, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett (both Trump appointees), concurred with the dissents in this case. Conspicuously absent from this group was Justice Brett Kavanaugh, another appointee to the court by President Donald Trump.

Chief Justice John Roberts, meanwhile, now typically sides with the court’s remaining three liberal justices — Elena Kagan, Stephen Breyer, and Sonia Sotomayor. The majority opinion, however, was left unsigned, meaning that none of the justices in the majority wanted to take personal ownership for penning the legal reasoning behind the decision.

The CMS states that the ruling “will cover 10.4 million health care workers at 76,000 medical facilities.” However, concerns persist that the ruling could be later construed to be more expansive in its jurisdiction and apply to additional hospitals or medical facilities. Additionally, it remains to be seen how severely the Court’s decision will impact the current shortage of medical personnel with a new departure of staff who refuse to be vaccinated against their will and better judgment.

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