Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall (R) announced last week that he filed a brief in support of a lawsuit led by Kentucky seeking a permanent end to President Biden’s mandate that federal contractors and their employees must all receive the COVID-19 vaccination.
“On December 7, a federal district court granted the State of Alabama’s motion to enjoin President Biden’s federal-contractor vaccine mandate,” said Marshall. “Meanwhile, the Biden administration continues to fight in court to lift the injunction and force this ill-conceived and unlawful mandate on millions of federal contractors and their employees. In response, I’ve joined with other attorneys general in supporting Kentucky’s lawsuit to permanently block Biden’s mandate.”
Marshall and his fellow Republican Attorneys General from 20 other states filed an amicus brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit on March 9.
The brief claims that Biden’s executive order mandating vaccines for federal contractors was an unauthorized exercise of regulatory power. The Republican AGs in their brief claim that the president’s authority, in this case, is limited to “prescribing policies and directives.”
The Republicans claim that the President unlawfully delegated authority to the director of the Office of Management and Budget and a White House Task Force, away from the entity created by Congress to establish such procurement regulations.
In addition, the brief argues that the president failed to show that the mandate promotes economy and efficiency. The Republican AGs’ brief states:
"Neither the Executive Order nor any subsequent agency actions ‘identify any instance in which absenteeism attributable to COVID-19 among contractor employees resulted in delayed procurement or increased costs.’ ... Moreover, a vague interest in preventing ‘absenteeism’ in federal contractors in and of itself is not sufficiently related to the government’s general procurement policies to justify such a ‘sweeping, invasive, and unprecedented public health requirement imposed unilaterally by President Biden."
Finally, the brief argues that “the challenged actions seek to regulate public health, not improve the efficiency of contracting, rendering the actions blatantly pretextual.”
Marshall joined attorneys general from Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Texas, Utah and West Virginia in filing the amicus brief.
The state of Alabama under Marshall’s leadership has filed numerous lawsuits, along with the other AGs, challenging what they believe is executive overreach by the administration, particularly the COVID-19 mandates, all of which were done by executive order or administratively rather than by an act of Congress.
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