Attorney General Paxton and several allied states and companies sued the Biden Administration for its illegal and unconstitutional vaccine mandate imposed on private businesses. As part of his COVID-19 Action Plan announced in early September, President Biden committed to requiring all private employers in America with 100 or more employers to force their employees to get vaccinated or submit to a weekly testing regime. The Administration has now issued its Emergency Temporary Standard (ETS) implementing the mandate through the Department of Labor’s Occupational Health and Safety Administration (OSHA).  

“The Biden Administration’s new vaccine mandate on private businesses is a breathtaking abuse of federal power,” said Attorney General Paxton. “OSHA has only limited power and specific responsibilities. This latest move goes way outside those bounds. This ‘standard’ is flatly unconstitutional. Bottom line: Biden’s new mandate is bad policy and bad law, and I’m asking the Court to strike it down.”  

Attorney General Paxton filed the State of Texas’s Petition for Review directly with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. General Paxton will follow up soon with a Motion for Stay, in which he will lay out the many statutory and constitutional reasons why the Court must halt implementation of the ETS.  

The Petition for Review can be read here