Coronavirus
Floor Speech
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Mr. LANKFORD. Mr. President, last week, President Biden announced that he had lost patience with the American people and that he was demanding people get a vaccination.
Now, I have had the vaccine. I am grateful for the vaccine. But it is an entirely different issue for the President of the United States to wag his finger at the American people and to say: I know what you have chosen, but I choose something different, and you are going to follow me.
To literally instruct every employer with 100 employees or more, every Federal contractor, every Federal employee to bend to the will of the President and take this injection, that is a very different thing.
There are over 39 million Americans right now, that we know of, that have already had COVID-19, have survived it, and have natural immunity. The President's demand for a vaccine ignored those almost 40 million Americans that already have natural immunity. His demand was: I know you have natural immunity. I want you to get this vaccine as well.
It ignores cancer survivors who are very, very careful about what goes into their system. It ignores people with religious objections, and there are millions who have religious objections. It ignores individuals who just don't want to do it because they are an American and they don't have to and they do not like to have a Federal Government instructing them what they are going to actually put in their body.
Now, ironically, this was a random selection of companies that have 100 employees and up, so I assume that if you have 99 employees, you are all fine, but if you have 100 employees, it is totally different. There seems to be no accounting for where your employees work. Are your employees all tightly packed, all 100 in one small room, or are your employees all working outside? Do you have 100 employees, but they are in 19 different locations?
There seems to be no accommodation for any of those. It is just the President saying: I have lost patience. You need to go get the vaccine immediately.
So, by Thanksgiving, he is planning on laying this vaccine mandate down on the country. There are multiple problems there, as I have already outlined: the 40 million people who have already survived COVID and don't want to do the vaccine, the individuals in different medical treatments, the individuals with different other religious issues that they have.
But it is also an issue of trying to have a mandate come down from the Federal Government with an Executive order. That is not how our system works. The President of the United States does not have the ability to be able to just demand behavior from the American people. That is not their role.
It has been interesting to me. I have had several people who have reached out to me and said: I found out that the President's order exempts Congress. So how come you get an exemption and I don't?
I quickly responded back to them: Because we are a coequal branch of government, and the President is trying to find everybody under his purview to be able to do this. But the judicial branch and the legislative branch aren't under his purview. Neither should be the American people because the American people do not work for the President of the United States. And companies of 100 people or more, their chief executive, their leadership does not work for the President of the United States.
So now what? There are lawsuits that are pending, but those lawsuits can't move forward until the actual paperwork comes out from the White House. When the actual paperwork comes out in the next couple of weeks, we assume--we have not been told--then they will have what is called standing in the courts, and litigation from across the country will be able to speak into and Federal judges across the country will be able to move on an injunction on this out-of-control mandate and to be able to say they cannot just compel people to be able to go take a shot because the President wants them to get it.
So that will be the first big step. There will be legislative challenges that will come through this body. They are slower, so the Federal courts are the fastest response to this. But there will be multiple other groups that will push back on this, myself included.
Listen, why would we not respect those individuals who have already had COVID-19? According to an article that is in the Wall Street Journal just today, there was a study out of Israel that shows that the immunity from natural immunity is 27 times more effective than the shot--27 times, according to the study that has just recently come out.
To ignore that and to say that is not enough is absurd--or to compel Americans, whether they have had COVID or not, to be able to have a behavior just because the President has ``lost patience'' is not who we are as Americans. It is not constitutional. It will not stand in the courts and should not stand. We should push back on this.
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