This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Saturday, September 18th, 2021.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Biden administration will try to compel employers, to compel their employees,

to either get vaccinated or submit to regular testing.

Cato Senior Fellow Walter Olson discusses the legal case.

You start out with the existence of the Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the law that authorized it 50 years ago

and that's a law that on the face of it gives that federal agency

pretty astonishing huge powers.

You might think that OSHA would be declared unconstitutional on an interstate

commerce basis.

For example, it just goes further, it intrudes into more issues of workplace administration

than you would need to do in order to reach interstate commerce, and yet there was no such successful challenge.

You might believe that OSHA's manner of regulating is too peremptory, that it tramples property

rights without compensation for example or in other ways goes over a constitutional

law. And once again, those systemic issues of the agency have not successfully been challenged

on a constitutional basis, which means that you

start out in a pretty bad position as a challenger as far as what the agency has already been

allowed to do by courts.

Courts have struck down individual regulations

on a different ground typically, which

is the administrative law considerations of,

did they compile a reasoned basis is this in accord with the specific language of the statute

...