We will hear argument first this morning in application 21A244 National Federation of Independent Business versus the Department of Labor and the Consolidated Case.

Hey everyone, this is Leon from Viasco and Prologg Projects. On this week's episode of 5-4, Peter, Riannan and Michael are talking about the ongoing case against OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, and its efforts to protect workers from COVID-19.

By a vote of 6-3, the Supreme Court is blocking the Biden administration from carrying out the rules imposed by OSHA that would require companies that employ more than 100 workers to make sure that all their employees either get vaccinated for COVID or wear masks and be tested once a week.

For a week, the court recently held that while the suit is ongoing, OSHA's emergency requirement cannot go into effect. The result is that your employer can continue to require you to work alongside your un-mathed and un-vaccinated colleagues. This is 5-4, a podcast about how much the Supreme Court sucks.

Welcome to 5-4, where we dissect and analyze the Supreme Court cases that have let our rights drift ever further from us, like the decaying orbit of a distant planet from the warmth of its sun. I am Peter, I'm here with Michael.

And Riannan.

Hello, hi everyone.

Michael once you told me maybe a metaphor about a decaying orbit. I didn't know what that was, but I looked it up.

Now we have the science by it. We're good to go. Yeah. Sometimes I do like scientific ones and then people correct me on Twitter. They're like actually a little orbits don't decay per se.

It's funny, I forgot that I recommended it to you, but when you said that, I was like, ooh, nice.

Wow, Peter, that's really sharp.

Peter sounds really smart today.

Before we get started here, we want to give a quick shout out to our listeners. In December, we did a sort of holiday special where we provided a bunch of organizations that do good work and need money.

And we got pretty consistent feedback from all of those organizations that it resulted in a whole lot more donations than we expected.

So we want to say thanks to our listeners, surprisingly good news coming out of that episode. It was very cool.

It was very cool to hear. Yeah, it's awesome. Thank you. Yeah, thank you so much. A little bit of light, a little bit of hope. We didn't know how anybody would react to that short little random episode. But yeah, it was great news to hear back that small organizations were getting thousands of dollars unexpectedly.

That's good stuff. So thanks to everybody. Yeah. Yeah. So today's case is national federation of independent business. The Department of Labor.

This is a case about vaccine mandates. Last year, the Biden administration made employer mandated vaccines and testing a central component of its COVID-19 strategy, most notably issuing an occupational health and safety administration rule. That's OSHA for short.

In this case, just a few weeks ago, the Supreme Court struck down the Biden administration's employer vaccine mandate claiming that they were beyond the authority of OSHA.

There's a lot going on here. There's culture war fireworks. There's wrangling about the scope of the administrative state. So legal podcasters dream and nightmare because it has all of the different types of stupid shit.

All sort of swirling around one another. So re some context here, some background. Yeah, sure. Let's jump into the stupid shit. You know, I'll go ahead and say that this is more nightmare than dream for me. But you know, here we are again, another week.

Legal podcasting, baby. You don't love the law enough. No, I hate it with every fiber of my being. Okay, let's talk a little bit about OSHA and how it got created and why.

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