Joe Biden went full authoritarian about COVID-19 vaccine mandates Thursday when he announced a federal mandate imposed upon businesses with more than 100 employees. There are some big union exceptions to the mandate – like postal workers – but for non-union workers across the country, if they don’t get vaccinated, they can lose their job. A lot of pieces of this new mandate are still missing, as Biden has a habit of announcing sweeping orders before all the details are written out on paper. When that happens, likely in a couple of weeks, nineteen governors have promised to fight the mandate.

The reason for the big union carve-outs is because this is a political decision from Team Biden, not one based in science. Unions contribute almost solely to Democrat campaigns and contributed heavily to the Biden presidential campaign. Both Joe and Jill Biden are greatly compromised in their decision-making abilities due to using union support for political expediency. Remember Jill and Joe reassuring teachers’ unions that they’d have a friend living in the White House?

It is now perfectly predictable that governors will reject a mandate issued from the White House on vaccines. Conservatives reject a federal government one-size-fits-all approach to governing. Nineteen Republican governors vow to fight the mandate “to the gates of hell” as Governor Henry McMaster of South Carolina said.

“The American Dream has turned into a nightmare under President Biden and the radical Democrats,” Republican South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster said on Twitter. “They have declared war against capitalism, thumbed their noses at the Constitution, and empowered our enemies abroad.”

“Rest assured, we will fight them to the gates of hell to protect the liberty and livelihood of every South Carolinian,” he added.

This is no small mandate. It can affect up to 80 million workers. It places the burden of enforcement on employers to verify that workers are vaccinated or to make sure they tested regularly for the virus. Biden is doing a workaround through OSHA in order to justify a federal mandate. Nineteen governors have vowed to fight the order, along with two attorneys general so far. Most have released statements on the subject. The states involved include Arizona, Alabama, Alaska, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Iowa, Missouri, Mississippi, Montana, Nebraska, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and Wyoming. All red states. The intention of the Biden administration is to divide the country further, not unite us in the war on COVID-19. Biden went so far as to threaten governors who do not fall in line – that’s a nice little state you have there, it’d be a shame if anything happened to it. He completely ignores the 10th Amendment in his thirst for power.

The hyper-partisan Democrat host of Meet the Press, Chuck Todd, said this morning that his show had invited all nineteen governors to come on the show and discuss the mandate. The only one who accepted the invitation – Governor Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas – likely disappointed Todd. Often Hutchinson is happy to go along to get along with Democrats but not this morning. He said that using cover from OSHA enforcement of the mandate and a top-down approach will backfire. He is not supportive of Biden’s mandate and says that he will continue to encourage residents of his state to get vaccinated. He rightly points to the burden placed on business owners and the negative effect the mandate will have on the labor market. Some business owners may be relieved to let the federal government dictate their employees’ personal health decisions, as they can just point to the mandate and say it’s not them, it’s Biden, but most business owners don’t want to get mired down in the personal choices of their employees.

Dr. Scott Gottlieb said on Face the Nation this morning that a federal mandate is not the way to go. He sits on the board of Pfizer and was a member of the Trump administration as head of FDA. He’s very pro-vaccination but in this case, he says it will backfire. By using a sweeping federal mandate, the people not inclined to get vaccinated will only dig in deeper with their opposition. It doesn’t change anyone’s mind about COVID-19 vaccines. He essentially said the same that Governor Hutchinson said – the one-size-fits-all top-down federal approach doesn’t work well. Both believe the decision on vaccines should be left to local communities.

As a side note, Gottlieb said that a COVID-19 vaccine for children ages 5 to 12, currently not eligible for them, will likely be ready around October. He predicts that eventually a COVID-19 vaccine will be added to the childhood immunization schedule.

The OSHA rules for compliance have not been written. When they are and distributed to governors and other public officials, that is when to look for the lawsuits to begin.

Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, the chair of the National Governors Association, said in a statement, “I fully support continued efforts to increase vaccination rates across our nation, but the federal government mandates on private businesses are not the right answer.

“I have been consistent in freedom of businesses to require their employees to be vaccinated, and I have opposed the government from saying businesses cannot exercise that freedom,” he added. “The same principle should protect the private sector from government overreach that requires them to vaccinate all employees.”

“The COVID-19 vaccines are safe and effective tools to prevent the disease, but getting the vaccine is and should be a choice,” Arizona Gov. Doug Ducey said in a statement. “These mandates are outrageous. They will never stand up in court. We must and will push back.”

“I will pursue every legal option available to the state of Georgia to stop this blatantly unlawful overreach by the Biden administration,” Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp said on Twitter.

South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem issued a statement on Twitter, saying, “South Dakota will stand up to defend freedom. @JoeBiden see you in court.” She later shared another Twitter post saying that her legal team is prepared to stand up to the Biden administration’s mandates.

Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts was interviewed on Fox News Sunday. He said that the attorney general in Nebraska and other states are looking into how to ‘attack” the mandate in court.

“I’ve been talking to my attorney general, he is coordinating with the other attorneys general across the country who share similar views about the overreach,” Ricketts told Chris Wallace during an interview on “Fox News Sunday.”

“As we see what these rules are we will be able to know exactly how we will be able to challenge them in court. I’m also talking with my colleagues around the country as well the other governors who feel the way I do, and we’ll be working on other strategies,” he added.

Ricketts said going to court would occur once authorities better grasp of the rules being implemented.

“When we get an idea of what these rules exactly will be we’ll know how to be able to attack it in court,” he said.

Ricketts said the choice to be vaccinated is a personal one. He also stressed that a worker shouldn’t have to choose between vaccination and a job.

We aren’t all in this together and we haven’t been since the start of the pandemic. Mandates and mitigation of the virus quickly turned political. Biden wouldn’t likely have had such difficulty getting a larger number of Americans vaccinated if he and Kamala and other prominent Democrats didn’t come out against the COVID-19 vaccines while Trump was president. Most of the actions taken have been all about politics and not much about following science. The rules were for the little people, not elected officials and members of big unions. Members of Congress and their staffers are also exempt from Biden’s mandate.

Kamala Harris: “If Donald Trump tells us that we should take [the vaccine], I'm not taking it."pic.twitter.com/MBU58dHU9G

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) September 10, 2021