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https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2021/09/15/the_deep_politics_of_vaccine_mandates_146408.html

The Deep Politics Of Vaccine Mandates



The debate over President Biden’s vaccine mandates has focused,
understandably, on the tradeoff between individual rights to make
medical choices and the potential harm the unvaccinated pose to
others.

That tradeoff is unavoidable.

It is simply wrong for Biden to say, “It’s not about freedom.” It is.

It is equally wrong for some Republican governors to say it is all
about freedom.

It’s also about the external effects of each person’s choice. To
pretend that tradeoff doesn’t exist is demagoguery. But then, so is
most American politics these days.

What’s missing or underappreciated in this debate?

The most important thing is that the Biden administration’s “mandate
approach” is standard-issue progressivism. The pushback is equally
standard. The mandates exemplify a dispute that has been at the heart
of American politics for over a century, ever since Woodrow Wilson
formulated it as a professor and then president. That agenda
emphasizes deference to

    Experts, not elected politicians,

    Rational bureaucratic procedures,

    Centralized power in the nation’s capital, not in the federal states, and

    A modern, “living constitution,” which replaces the “old”
Constitution of 1787 and severs the restraints it imposed on
government power.

Implemented over several decades, this progressive agenda has
gradually become a fait accompli, without ever formally amending the
Constitution. The bureaucracies began their massive growth after World
War II and especially after Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society initiatives
of the mid-1960s (continued, with equal vigor, by Richard Nixon).

The judicial shackles were broken earlier, when Franklin Roosevelt
threatened to pack the Supreme Court in 1937. Although FDR never
followed through, his threat did the trick. The justices yielded to
his pressure and began rubber-stamping New Deal programs that, until
then, they had rejected as unconstitutional. Gradually, the older
judges retired and Roosevelt picked friendly replacements. These
judicial issues have reemerged now that progressives no longer
dominate the Supreme Court. They are again threatening to pack the
court and demanding that today’s justices stick with precedents set by
their progressive predecessors (“stare decisis”).

The pushback against vaccine mandates is partly a debate about these
progressive issues concerning the president’s authority and
constitutional strictures.

Mandate opponents say the federal government lacks the constitutional
authority to impose these requirements, at least beyond its own
workforce. They add that, if the president does wish to impose new
rules, he and his executive agencies must go through the normal
regulatory process. That process is slow — indeed, too slow to cope
with an emergency.

Biden himself seemed to recognize these constitutional limitations
before deciding to ignore them — the second time he’s done so in his
brief presidency. That’s a very troubling development, even if the
courts overrule his decisions.

The first time was his fiat decision to extend the moratorium on rent
payments, which had been imposed during the worst days of the
pandemic. Biden explicitly stated his unconstitutional rationale: It
would take the courts time to rule against him and, until then, he
could implement the policy. Of course, he also had a political
rationale: to placate his party’s far left, which had mobilized over
this issue.

Biden’s extension on the rent moratorium had a second, troubling
dimension. It was promulgated by the Centers for Disease Control as a
“public health issue.” That was a transparently false rationale in
summer 2021 and dealt with housing issues far beyond the CDC’s
expertise. The unintended consequence of the moratorium extension,
beyond bankrupting small landlords, is to undermine the basic
rationale for all progressive rulemaking: that the rules are being
made by experts who know much more about their specialized area than
do ordinary citizens or their elected representatives. What, pray
tell, do experts on infectious disease know about the complexities of
the U.S. housing market? Zero.

Progressive politics depends on public acceptance that experts really
know what’s best and that their decisions will produce good outcomes.
But trust in experts has collapsed alongside trust in all American
institutions over the past half-century. The turning point was the
disastrous war in Vietnam, advocated by LBJ’s Harvard advisers and the
Whiz Kids in Robert McNamara’s Pentagon. Their failure was captured in
the title of David Halberstam’s 1973 bestseller, “The Best and the
Brightest.” The calamitous Afghan withdrawal underscored Halberstam’s
sarcastic point.

So did the failure of so many Great Society programs, begun with such
hope and fanfare. The most painful experience was “urban renewal,”
especially the massive program of building high-rise towers for
welfare recipients. Before those towers were torn down, they had
destroyed two or three generations of families. Part of the tragedy
was that, like so many federal programs, the towers were built
everywhere at once. If they had been tried out in a few cities, the
problems would have been obvious, the failures remedied or the program
abandoned. But Washington almost never does that. Congress funds and
the bureaucracies implement mammoth, nationwide programs with no
opportunity for feedback or mid-course corrections.

As public mistrust of institutions grew, a few institutions initially
escaped the scorn. The military, for instance, was highly regarded
until recently. It will take a heavy blow from the Afghan failure and
the new, high-priority program of ideological training for troops.
Government health officials were also highly regarded, at least until
the botched rollout of Obamacare and the scandals at Veterans’ Affairs
hospitals. Still, the public trusted the CDC and Dr. Anthony Fauci at
the beginning of the pandemic. They trust them far less today, thanks
to false and misleading statements, secrecy about funding the Wuhan
virology lab, the absence of clear guidance on many issues, and blunt
regulations that ignore important variations, such as natural
immunity.

The effect of this growing mistrust was painfully apparent in
President Biden’s mandate announcement. He didn’t rely on persuasion
or trust in federal experts. He hectored, demonized, shamed,
politicized, and threatened. That has become his routine, along with
his refusal to answer the public’s pressing questions.

Biden’s political problem is that he faces real resistance from voters
if he can’t solve the COVID problem, both because it is so serious and
because he ran on being able to handle it better than Trump. Since
Biden’s speech last week spent a lot of time attacking Republican
governors, it was also an exercise in preemptive blame-shifting, in
case the mandates fail.

His approach makes political sense, but it has at least two problems
beyond the constitutional questions. One is that it politicizes
vaccinations, which could have unintended consequences. Among the most
obvious, it shifts the issue away from doctors and public health
professionals and into the contentious political arena. Another is
that it raises questions about the administration’s hypocrisy. Why do
all federal employees, including those with natural immunity, need to
get vaccinations but not the illegal immigrants arriving from Central
America? That’s clearly a political decision, not a medical one, and
it undermines the legitimacy of Biden’s whole approach, which stresses
public health and medical experts.

The president’s speech had another major feature: It relied on
vitriolic “wedge politics.” But Biden was elected partly because he
promised to end the vitriol and divisiveness of the Trump years. He
hasn’t done that. The poster child for his tendentious governing
strategy is the second, $3.5 trillion “human infrastructure” bill. Not
only does it have no Republican support, it has met serious resistance
from centrist Democrats. On his signature spending bills, like his
vaccine mandates, Biden is pursuing a unilateral, aggressively
partisan approach.

There’s no question the delta variant poses serious health risks and
that, in general, vaccinations help both the individuals who get the
jab and everyone around them. But there are serious questions about
whether sticks or carrots are the best way to increase vaccination
rates; how to convince people to get the vaccine now that trust in
public-health experts has eroded; whether politicizing the issue is
self-defeating; and what authority Washington has to impose mandates
beyond its own workforce.

The questions about the federal government’s authority — its
effectiveness, its constitutionality, and its potential overreach —
are among the most important in American politics. They have been for
a century, and they won’t be resolved anytime soon.