good to be with you. i m katy tur. we begin this hour with a rare emergency session at the u.s. supreme court. justices convened today to hear arguments about two biden administration mandates aimed at stopping the spread of covid-19 and getting more americans vaccinated. the first case concerns a federal requirement that all employers with over 100 workers require vaccines or regular testing and masks for the unvaccinated. those rules would impact roughly 84 million people. the second case is specific to health care. health care workers, that is. providers that get money from medicare and medicaid. that mandate, currently frozen by a lower court, would affect 17 million people. at issue is whether osha and hhs have the legal authority to make these changes.
give the power. justice sotomayor floated the spending clause. so again, i think we might be in a world where some of these justices just think government shouldn t be able to do this at the federal level, period. kim, how would that maybe expand to other requirements that we have across the united states? is there anything else that you re thinking of? sure. you know, this goes back to something called the nondelegation doctrine, that last reared its head in fdr s new deal. and conservatives, when fdr started creating all kinds of agencies to regulate the economy in the wake of the stock market crash, saying listen, we need more government intervention, the argument was only congress can make laws, and the supreme court started striking down agency authority to regulate. they call these regulations, they function at laws. agencies do everything from manage nuclear waste facilities to aviation to import/export
the majority of the supreme court s conservatives seem to be concerned about sort of three things. number one, the fact that this is such a broad mandate, it s not targeted to any individual industries, it doesn t make a differentiation between someplace that has workers all spread out and some places where it has assembly line workers standing shoulder to shoulder. secondly, that covid is not strictly a workplace hazard, that seemed to bother some of the conservatives. osha certainly can control workplace hazards. but these conservatives said covid is everywhere, it s not limited to the workplace. then the question of whether congress gave osha the authority to do this was a central question and a lot of the conservatives seemed to say no, that for something this sweeping, affecting this many people, it would have to have an action by congress. obviously the administration is supporting this, they say it is a workplace hazard, osha has that authority. it s less clear, katy, what the