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Floor Speech

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Mr. LEE. Mr. President, I am here on the Senate floor now for the 21st time specifically to oppose President Biden's sweeping vaccine mandates.

I have introduced over a dozen bills to one way or another limit, clarify, or counteract the mandates. Every time I have come to ask the Senate to pass what should, frankly, be uncontroversial matters, one of my colleagues or another from the other side of the aisle has come to object. This is unfortunate. It is unfortunate, really, for a number of reasons.

These mandates, while currently being challenged in court in a number of jurisdictions, show the terrible power that even the threat of a vaccine mandate can wield. Businesses across the country are suspending, punishing, and firing employees who haven't had the COVID shot. The threat of the mandate is making it harder for everyday American families just to put food on the table and to do so, moreover, in increasingly difficult economic times.

Now, these are not our enemies. These are not people to be feared. These are not people to shun or loathe entirely, as the mandates seem to suggest. No. No. These are our friends and our neighbors. These are mothers and fathers. These are people who, like far too many Americans, are just struggling to get by.

I am going to continue to fight for them and to protect them because they understand something that President Biden has yet to accept even though, deep down, I know he does know it, and that is, this isn't right. It is not right for him to do. It is not right constitutionally for about a dozen reasons, but it is also just not right morally.

It is a morally unacceptable proposition to suggest that someone should get fired just because they don't conform to Presidential medical orthodoxy. It is immoral to tell someone that their ability to put food on the table for their children depends on whether they get a shot--a shot that they may or may not want; a shot that may or may not conflict with their religious or sincerely held beliefs, that might be contraindicated by one or more conditions, resulting in their doctors advising them not to get the shot.

This is not something that anyone should do. In fact, the American people agree. According to a recent Axios poll, only 14 percent of Americans--just 14 out of every 100 Americans--agree with the apparent position of the President of the United States that if someone doesn't get the shot, they should be fired. I would imagine it is even fewer than that. Fourteen out of a hundred isn't very many to begin with, but I am pretty sure it is even fewer than that--far fewer--who would say that it is OK for one person within the Federal Government to decide to fire everyone who doesn't comply within the government and also to tell private employers that they will receive crippling, company-destroying fines--that no company, not even the wealthiest out there, could live with--if they don't fire every one of their employees or otherwise take adverse action against them in their declining to take the shot. It is not OK.

In this effort, I have, to be sure, been supremely clear. I am not in any way against the COVID-19 vaccinations--quite to the contrary. I have been vaccinated. I have encouraged people to seek out all the relevant information and be vaccinated. I believe that the COVID-19 vaccines are keeping countless Americans safe from the harm threatened by the COVID-19 virus.

This is different than that. As a matter of fact, there is an undercut, and it can't offset the fact that this mandate is pushing government control beyond the constitutional limits and into the private decisions of the American people.

That is why I am against all of these mandates for all age groups, and that is why I have come to the Senate floor repeatedly to help and to call on my colleagues and President Biden himself to end this madness once and for all, to end it before it is too late, to end it before irreparable harm is inflicted on those who, for whatever reason, can't or are otherwise inclined not to comply with his directions.

I have even offered a bill, one that should be unusually, uniquely uncontroversial, but even that one met objection. It was a simple reaffirmation of parental rights that our government has respected and honored and even protected from the beginning.

My Parental Consent for Vaccination Act would simply require that any COVID-19 vaccine mandate issued by the Federal Government--to be clear, it shouldn't be issuing any at all, but any of them that it happens to issue must be a mandate that includes a requirement that informed parental consent be provided before the shot can be administered to a minor.

Now, this one is so far afield from the broader question of whether we should have these mandates at all. It is the slightly narrower question of whether the President of the United States should administer them. It really should not be controversial.

Now, allow me to put this issue in some context here. Parental consent is required for all sorts of things. Parental consent, as every parent with school-aged children knows, is required for field trips. Parental consent is required for pretty much all extracurricular activities. For that matter, it is required for many in-class activities. Parental consent is required before most schools can administer so much as a Tylenol or a baby aspirin to a child. Everyone knows that. None of that is happening without parental consent.

That is, to be sure, the right approach. It is as it should be. Despite what some candidates have said in some recent political campaigns, parents should be informed and involved in their children's education and certainly in their child's health decisions, in matters of medical treatment.

Parents, it is important to remember, are simply better equipped to make these decisions. Parents know their children, and they know their children's medical histories. Parents know their moral, their religious, and their health requirements that are, in many cases, unique to their families. It is certainly something that no government and no school can keep track of in the same way that a government or a school does. Parents also love their children--that is important here-- and parents, because they love their children, have their children's best interests at heart when they make decisions affecting them.

The government can't do any of those things. It certainly can't do any of those things anywhere close to as well as a parent could. The reason for that is fairly simple. It is because government doesn't have arms with which to embrace children. The government doesn't have a heart with which to love children. The government doesn't even have eyes to see or ears to hear because government, of course, when reduced to its essence, when we really define it as what it is, is simply force. It is legally authorized violence.

Now, thank Heaven that God and the law have always assigned the primary care of their children to parents and not to government. Government is just the official actual or threatened use of force. We need government. It is also one of the many reasons we have to be careful with it just like other things that we rely on in so many ways--things like electricity, like moving water, like fire. They are all necessary to our day-to-day lives, and yet when left uncontrolled, they are dangerous and quickly become fatal when we don't exercise due caution.

This has, of course, been acknowledged for millennia. It has been written about widely for many, many centuries, even centuries before the founding of our Republic. And it has been acknowledged since the very earliest days of our Republic.

George Washington himself warned the people about this, warning that government is itself forced and is therefore dangerous and has to be carefully managed. That is why we have a Constitution. That is why we have all these rules about government.

If men were angels, we wouldn't need government. If we had access to angels to run our government, as James Madison described it in Federalist 51, then we wouldn't have to bother about government abusing its power, and we wouldn't need all these rules.

But we are not angels. Men and women are not angels. And we don't have access to angels to run our government, and so we have to have rules governing the use of government. And it is for our own safety.

Nowhere is this more important than with respect to our children. That is where we can really see laid bare the essential, core facts of what government is, which is the actual or threatened use of coercive force.

Now, I also thank heaven above that God didn't assign the anonymous masses on the internet to care for children. The pressure children receive through social media, through news publications, and common video sites lacks nuance and any specific understanding of a child's health condition or history or religious beliefs.

There are even reports in prominent magazines of children being advised to commit fraud or cross State lines to be vaccinated specifically against their parents' advice, circumventing parental authority.

There is a reason why the FDA requires the fine print and the sometimes very painfully exhaustive and descriptive side-effect warnings on pharmaceutical advertisements and why those ads always encourage viewers to consult their doctors. But in the brave new world of Big Brother healthcare, students aren't encouraged to consult their parents, let alone their doctors.

Unfortunately, in some places, like here in our Nation's Capital, government has completely lost the plot. In the District of Columbia school system, for example, minors can receive medical procedures without the school even informing the parents. In other places across the Nation, this slippery slope is already leading governments to consider life-changing, school-provided medical procedures without parental notice and without parental consent.

As a parent, this thought sends shivers down my spine. I know I am not alone in that respect--far from it. Most Americans, regardless of what part of the country they come from, regardless of creed, political affiliation, socioeconomic status, or any other single factor, if they are parents, they are going to feel the same way. They don't like the idea of someone else taking over the raising of their child. They don't like the idea of government taking over control of medical decisions on behalf of their child. You see, that is supplanting their role. That is moving them out of the way.

School-aged kids are also some of those least at risk of contracting, spreading, and suffering long-term or serious effects from COVID. The data has shown this all along. The vaccines, on the other hand, may pose a more serious risk to some young people than they do the general population. Various countries, including France and Germany, have ceased recommending some COVID vaccines to those under the age of 30 because of complications.

Again, I am not against the vaccines, but the thought of schools, social media, or, heaven forbid, government pressuring students into vaccination without parental consent is rightfully troubling. It is downright chilling, and it should not happen--not here, not in the United States of America.

While the Federal Government has almost no legitimate role in influencing local education decisions, we can make sure that the Federal Government does not endorse or, heaven forbid, mandate this dangerous approach to medical decisions for minors. That is not too much to ask. That is not something that should be controversial here in the U.S. Senate. That is not something that is remotely controversial among the good people of this country--left and right, rich and poor.

If they are parents, they are deeply disturbed by the thought of the cold, impersonal force that is government pushing them out of the way to make these medical decisions for them and for their children.

So let's provide assurance to parents and children. Let's reaffirm our commitment to supporting parents in making decisions for their children. Let's protect kids, and let's end these mandates.

They are illegal. They are unconstitutional, and they are morally indefensible.

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