What This Pandemic Needs Is More Input From Congress
In November, when the Biden administration imposed a federal coronavirus-vaccine mandate on all employers with 100 or more workers, it did so through the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, a federal agency that Congress created in the early 1970s to ensure safe working conditions. Now the Supreme Court has blocked OSHA’s action, ruling that the agency lacked the authority to order large employers to require all workers to be vaccinated or frequently tested.
Critics of the decision have decried it as a deadly blow to an effective pandemic safeguard. Be that as it may, in our constitutional system, Congress is the body that should determine whether to impose a federal vaccine mandate. And generally, the United States would be better served if Congress voted on more federal pandemic policies, rather than ceding basic judgments about how society operates to the president or the federal agencies that he oversees.
COVID-19 began as an emergency, and virus variants have repeatedly presented new emergencies. It is therefore appropriate that significant decisions, like much of Operation Warp Speed, should have been made by the executive branch. But when Congress has time to weigh a decision, it ought to chart America’s course. On March 27, 2020—just two weeks after the emergent pandemic forced businesses and schools to shut down—federal lawmakers approved the $2.2 trillion Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act. So Congress is capable of acting. By and large, though, it has chosen to be characteristically passive during this crisis and left major pandemic-policy matters—such as who should be allowed to enter the country and whether employers should require workers to get shots—to President Donald Trump and then President Joe Biden.
Congressional policy making has downsides. Federal bureaucrats can marshal technical expertise that legislators generally lack and enact many policies and regulations faster than the House or Senate can typically write, debate, and pass laws. Today’s Congress is often mired in grandstanding, obstructionism, and stalemate. And many members of Congress prefer to cede their power to the executive branch, because it helps them avoid controversial votes.
But as the think-tank scholar Philip Wallach wrote in “Congress Indispensable,” a 2018 essay in National Affairs, “the very features that would-be reformers find most exasperating—its messiness, balkiness, and cacophony—are those that render our representative legislature capable, in ways the other branches are not, of maintaining the bonds that hold together our sprawling republic.” The legislative branch is “a poor champion of efficient government,” Wallach added, but he argued that representative government promotes coalition building, improves trust, and makes the government genuinely accountable to the public.
In that telling, congressional policy making has no good substitute in a big, diverse country, particularly one where many are fretting about ineffective government, widening polarization, and even potential civil war. The dearth of…
Read More: What This Pandemic Needs Is More Input From Congress