Thread by @nycsouthpaw

I don’t think it’s right to categorize this as executive unilateralism. Congress granted a clear authority to address grave dangers in the workplace to the agency in the OSH Act and Richard Nixon signed it. The conservative movement has never liked it but it’s a duly enacted law.

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1481715800734064644

The extraordinary scope of the vaccine mandate arises from the pandemic itself being an extraordinary once-a-century sort of thing (knock on wood), not from it being a strained interpretation of the law.

But the court’s conservatives have jumped at the chance to entrench a fairly novel and, imo, deeply unwise principle (“major questions” doctrine) that it’s somehow wrong to adapt existing law to new and unforeseen circumstances and so you must go back to Congress.

That’s a judicial innovation that, we may soon see, hobbles the whole body of administrative law and—true to Matt’s point—enhances the power of the filibuster. But blaming the executive for unilateralism when it uses its existing statutory authority doesn’t seem right to me.