Abortion

Floor Speech

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Mr. LEE. Madam President, I rise again today to express my objection to President Biden's sweeping vaccine mandate and to offer legislation that would protect Americans from this Federal intrusion.

As I said yesterday, the Federal Government has no business mandating COVID-19 vaccination for all Americans. Unfortunately, at least some of my colleagues disagree. The President of the United States said, while announcing the mandate, ``This isn't about freedom or personal choice.''

``This isn't about freedom or personal choice.'' It stuns me to think that a sweeping Federal mandate could be about anything other than freedom or personal choice. It is like robbing a bank and then saying it is not about the money.

Our Constitution was designed to protect the liberties of the people of the United States. But now, the government is being used by the Executive to force Americans to be vaccinated or to be terminated.

Yesterday, I came to the floor to speak about those Americans with sincerely held beliefs, whether religious or otherwise. My bill yesterday would have simply required that any mandate of this sort contain an exemption for those individuals.

Now, I don't believe that such an exception would be sufficient to resolve the constitutional and the policy problems with such a mandate. But there are millions of Americans who would be able to live according to their beliefs if, in fact, such an exemption were included by law, which it should be.

Lamentably, my colleague the senior Senator from Washington objected. So I pledged to come back again today and tomorrow, for as long as it takes, to win the fight against this egregious mandate.

Today, I am providing another opportunity for this body to protect Americans.

This mandate poses a real threat to the well-being of millions. Those who choose not to be vaccinated are at risk of losing their jobs. My office has been in contact with 144 Utahns who are concerned about this very issue. I shared some of their stories yesterday.

Despite what many on the other side of this debate would have you believe, these are, in fact, everyday Americans: people with preexisting medical conditions, like autoimmune disorders. These are people who are just wanting to provide for their families and not to be able to expect that. These are pregnant mothers who are concerned about the safety of their own health and that of their unborn children.

Some of these people are the heroes of yesterday. They are first responders; they are medical professionals and essential workers who sacrificed to carry our Nation through the hardest days of this pandemic. And they are still heroes today. These Americans are not the enemy.

President Biden and those who support this effort are grasping for solutions they believe can bolster their political position and shift blame on the status of the pandemic. Those paying the price are the people back home, including many of the people I just described.

So today, I offer another proposal. This bill would provide those Americans harmed by this mandate with a means of recourse. Under this bill, those who lose employment or lose their livelihoods due to this mandate may sue the United States for relief. The bill would make these very Americans whole after the President of the United States made working impossible for them.

This bill is only one of many that I have introduced to combat this unconstitutional, unwarranted, indefensible mandate. While I believe this mandate will eventually be invalidated in court--I am quite confident that it will--until that day comes, these bills can provide businesses and the American people with the certainty that they need to make their own decisions. We will be protecting their God-given and constitutionally protected right to make medical decisions for themselves.

So, Madam President, I am here today and I will be back tomorrow and fighting against this mandate for as long as it takes.

Madam President, as if in legislative session, I ask unanimous consent that the Judiciary Committee be discharged from further consideration of S. 2840, and that the Senate proceed to its immediate consideration.

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Mr. LEE. Madam President, I appreciate the insight provided by my friend and distinguished colleague, the senior Senator from Illinois and the assistant majority leader.

I respectfully submit that this is about allowing people to obtain redress for, among other things, the awful Hobson's choice people are facing and are increasingly going to be facing as this mandate kicks in. It hasn't been issued yet. We still don't know what is in it. We still don't know his precise basis for the authority. We assume that he would have told us his precise basis for the authority if, in fact, it existed.

I have scoured the U.S. Code looking for authority for the President of the United States to implement this unilaterally, and I have found none. So it is very significant, therefore, that when you are going to put this kind of a Hobson's choice in front of the people, you ought to be able to at least have the decency to tell them what your source of authority is. He still hasn't done it.

If we assume that he is going to come up with one and that he is going to issue a mandate, that mandate is going to put a whole lot of people in a terrible position, forcing them to choose between getting a vaccine that, for whatever reason, they don't want and termination-- between submission and poverty. That is unfair.

Now, look, I get the fact that a lot of us were and are enthusiastic and grateful for the vaccine. I have received the vaccine, as has every member of my family. I think the vaccine is a good thing. I also understand that there are people who feel differently. In some cases, there are people who have been advised by board-certified medical doctors not to get the vaccine based on the existence of one or more autoimmune diseases, past personal or family history, and their idiosyncratic reactions to other vaccines or to this vaccine. There are other people who might have religious or other sincerely held personal beliefs that might make this choice a really unfair one for the Federal Government to force upon them.

So, yeah, I am glad we have got the vaccine. I think the vaccine is good. I think the vaccine is helping a lot of people. But to tell every American that he or she must get this under penalty of losing a job, and then for the President, after acknowledging that he doesn't have authority, to mandate this for every American turns America's employers--all those with more than 99 employees--into the COVID-19 vaccine police for the entire country.

It is unjustifiable, even at a policy level, before we get to the obvious constitutional defects and the lack of any semblance of any statutory authority. So I am disappointed that we can't pass this one today. I will be back again tomorrow. I will continue to come back for weeks to come because the American people deserve better than this. They deserve not to have people in Washington, DC, purporting to make very personal healthcare decisions for them and conditioning their own private-sector employment on compliance with the dictate of one man in Washington, DC.

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