Barrett, Kavanaugh reject religious liberty in support of vaccine mandates

In what could be called an unfortunate but expected moment of political déjà vu, Supreme Court Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh once again voted to reject religious liberty in support of COVID vaccine mandates and tyranny.

Do you remember how Trump and McConnell bragged about saving the courts? Good times.

Just last month, Barrett and Kavanaugh joined Chief Justice John Roberts and the far-left wing of the Supreme Court to deny a preliminary injunction to a group of medical professionals seeking a religious liberty exemption from Maine’s vaccine mandate.

The 6-3 ruling against religious liberty in that case meant that the group of Maine healthcare providers would face being mandatorily vaccinated for COVID against their religious beliefs or lose their jobs. “With Maine’s new rule coming into effect, one of the applicants has already lost her job for refusing to betray her faith; another risks the imminent loss of his medical practice,” Neil Gorsuch noted in his dissent at the time.

Barrett and Kavanaugh defended their votes against religious liberty based on their contention that the case was brought on the shadow docket, or as an emergency appeal. Shadow docket cases do not involve oral arguments or full rulings that are part of normal cases.

Barrett said the shadow docket should not be used for such a case, and that the court should not make this decision “on a short fuse without benefit of full briefing and oral argument,” implying she and Kavanaugh could vote differently if the case came before the court in a different way. (emphasis mine)

But that was a lie because they both voted again to reject religious liberty in favor of vaccine mandates in a different case earlier this week (via National Review):

The U.S. Supreme Court rejected two emergency requests to block New York’s vaccine mandate for health care workers on Monday.

Three nurses and a group called We the Patriots USA challenged the mandate, arguing that it violates the First Amendment because it does not include a religious exemption.

Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Samuel Alito dissented, saying in the order that they would have granted the request.

Gorsuch noted that two of the doctors are not “anti-vaxxers who object to all vaccines” and that their religious beliefs should be respected, particularly given that the state had only recently said religious exemptions would not be accepted and that the state has chosen to accept medical exemptions.

“Even if one were to read the State’s actions as something other than signs of animus, they leave little doubt that the revised mandate was specifically directed at the applicants’ unorthodox religious beliefs and practices,” Gorsuch said.

The decision comes after the high court has similarly allowed state mandates in Indiana and Maine to stand. (emphasis mine)

Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett continue to choose tyrannical government over liberty, something I and my conservative brethren warned about when Trump and McConnell pushed their nominations through the system.

Before her appointment to the Supreme Court, Amy Coney Barrett’s judicial track record exposed her as a conservative fraud, not a strict constructionist of the Constitution as we were told by Trump and McConnell. Barrett’s past showed that she was a big government, police state advocate who would continue the assault against our constitutionally protected liberties.

Constitutional attorney Robert Barnes reviewed over 40 cases involving Barrett and concluded that she would be a disaster as a Supreme Court justice when it comes to protecting liberty — particularly, religious liberty in the age of COVID tyranny:

“Coney Barrett has sid[ed] with the government on the lockdowns, on uncompensated takings, on excusing First Amendment infringements & Fourth Amendment violations… [and] exclaimed the benefits of Jacobson, the decision that green-lit forced vaccines & carved out an emergency exception to Constitutional protection in ‘public health’ or ’emergency’ cases used to justify forced sterilizations & detention camps.” (emphasis mine)

Barrett concurred with the majority in Illinois Republican Party et al. v. J.B. Pritzker, Governor of Illinois to keep an illegal lockdown in place, going so far as to her concurring vote behind the precedent established in 1905 in Jacobsen v. Massachusetts in order to avoid taking defending her decision.

The Jacobson decision gave the green light to vaccine mandates, and it carved out the emergency exception to Constitutional protection in “public health” or “emergency” cases used to justify state-mandated vaccinations. It was also the legal basis used in Korematsu v United States where the court ruled in 1942 that the internment of Japanese Americans was acceptable.

Earlier this year, Barrett rejected a request to block Indiana University’s vaccine mandates for students without providing any reason for doing so. She made the decision without consulting other justices as she could have done and suggested that there was no legal justification for the request.

When Anthony Kennedy resigned, Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell picked Brett Kavanaugh to replace him, and they promised that he was also a “strict constructionist.” But as we knew then and still know today, that was a lie.

Kavanaugh’s appointment to replace Kennedy was a bad deal for conservatives and the Constitution from the very beginning, and I opposed his confirmation for several reasons, especially his rulings against the Fourth Amendment and his testimony before the Senate that Roe v. Wade is “settled law”

COVID vaccines for children ages 5 to 11 are now mandated in many states. Based on what we’ve witnessed so far from Barrett and Kavanaugh, if a religious liberty challenge to such a mandate reaches the Supreme Court, it’s highly unlikely that children will be spared from COVID tyranny.

The judiciary was designed by the Founding Fathers to be the weakest branch of government; the real power is supposed to belong to “we the people” via the legislative branch and the individual states. In post-Constitutional America, unelected judges have taken that power from us.

Thanks to Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell, Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh have been given that power and have used it to reject religious liberty in support of COVID vaccine mandates.

 

---

David Leach is the owner of the Strident Conservative. He holds people of every political stripe accountable for their failure to uphold conservative values, and he promotes those values instead of political parties.

Follow the Strident Conservative on Twitter and Facebook.

Subscribe to receive podcasts of his daily two-minute radio feature: iTunes | Stitcher | Tune In | RSS

sp;