The Defense Department’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate has been rescinded, but two ex-service members are still asking the Supreme Court to consider its constitutionality – in a case with the potentiality to have significant implications as to whether a future mandate can be implemented.
On Tuesday, the petition for a writ of certiorari for Robert v. Austin was placed on the Supreme Court’s docket, meaning the justices will have to decide whether to hear the case. Four of the nine must choose to take up the case.
The case centers on the legality of the department’s COVID vaccine mandate, and “[w]hether the government may properly force citizens to receive an experimental gene-modifying injection.”
The lawsuit was initially filed in August 2021 in the U.S. District Court for the District of Colorado, which dismissed the complaint as non-justiciable.
The suit was then appealed to the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, which dismissed it as moot this past July.
After the plaintiffs’ failed request to have the appeals court hear the case en banc – meaning all the court’s judges would rehear the case – it was appealed to the Supreme Court.
The plaintiffs in the case are former Army member Dan Robert and Hollie Mulvihill, who was in the Marine Corps. Each left the military while the lawsuit was pending before the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, which the appeals court noted in its dismissal.
The defendants are Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, Secretary of Health and Human Services Xavier Becerra and Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Robert Califf. . . . (read more on Just the News)
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