funding, but this is important to remember. after the cases came to the supreme court in december on an emergency basis, the justices opted to expedite the cases for oral argument on whether the mandates can remain in place while the challenges proceed in the lower courts. here to break it all down is jonathan turley, george washington university law professor and contributor. let s start first with the osha ruling involving the businesses. well, that was really the big ticket mandate. that s the one that affected about 80 million workers, and the result was a major loss to the biden administration. this was one of the key pillars of the administration s pandemic policies, but the court made short work over it because they did not see the authority in this agency to require national
weak arguments and creating really strong precedent against their own office. laura: the healthcare ruling, professor, will add to the woes of these hospitals who can t keep staff and are really, really struggling. that also has a tangential and very important effect. great to talk to you tonight as always professor turley. while blue states pushing these ridiculous mandates and restrictions my next guest is empowering his constituents by putting money back in their pockets. what is that concept? joining us now nebraska governor pete governor, your state, i was so happy to read this on a day when i was just like looking at these mandates building up over the country. i was so happy to see that your state ran a huge surplus and you have an interesting idea about what to do with it. explain. yes, it s pretty radical. the money is not my money. it s not my agency s money.
representatives to decide. not some agency. laura: and justice thomas, in his dissent on the kind of companion case involving the healthcare workers, that was, you know, significant. four justices. so brett kavanaugh voted with the chief justice and the per curiam majority opinion upholding the mandates for the healthcare workers, but justice thomas wrote vaccine mandates also fall squarely within a state s police power and until now only rarely have been a tool of the federal government. if congress had wanted to grant cms authority to impose a nationwide vax mandate and consequently alter the state-federal balance it would have said so clearly. it did not. professor, did he have it right? well, this was a real close shave. they came within one vote of losing both cases, and this is the outcome that some of us predicted because you could tell that kavanaugh and roberts did
they go as radical as possible. they twist arms to get stuff done and then the court has to come in and say not so fast. i mean, this is what s happened on multiple occasions as you just said. i just want to get back to one thing because gorsuch wrote a concurring opinion in the osha case. he said osha arguably not even the agency associated with public health and in rare instances when congress has sought to do vaccinations, they have done so. did he nail that? he also went on to say who should decide how to respond to the pandemic? the states and congress, he said. that s really the rub here given how given how the science is changing on vaccines, health, safety, who can transmit. who gets infected. this is almost moot now given what we know now about omicron. i think that gorsuch concurrence is the one that has
particularly well for them for a vooirt of reasons. but i also find it interesting variety of reasons, but i also find it interesting that back in the summer of 2020 when the left was besieging the white house, federal courthouses, police precincts, et cetera, the the attorney general floated the idea this might be a way to go after some of that s people that were causing so much damage nationwide. there was massive uproar within the agency and also without side the agency. it was leaked in order to squash the plan. it s very interesting that now we see the department of justice doing the very same thing that was supposedly unacceptable when rioters were going after the entire country. but in general, also, the f.b.i. has tended to infiltrate various groups or just keep an eye on them or have informants and that can complicate the prosecutions as well. laura: to molly s point, the u.s. has a poor record of convicting people of sedition. the associated press noting that the last tim