3 SCOTUS Justices have a problem with Biden
and the Navy has 26 SEALs that need to go.
My youngest son is in the U.S. Navy. The kid’s been vaccinated for everything, and yet he got all his shots again upon joining.
It’s nothing new in the Navy or the rest of the U.S. Armed Forces. Washington had the Revolutionary Army vaccinated for small pox. It’s called military readiness and deployability, but it is more than that — a communicable disease can force a mission to be scrapped.
Just ask the sailors on board the U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt — on March 24, 2020, an outbreak of COVID-19 imperiled the ship’s mission1. Insofar as it was relatively early in the pandemic and an idiotic decision was made by President Trump to scrap the Obama pandemic playbook for his gut feeling that the COVID-19 crisis would be over by Easter that year, one could understand how the crisis became a chain of command issue more than an imperiled mission. In the end though, the U.S.S. Theodore Roosevelt’s deployment in the Pacific was ended early.
Two years and one day later, the U.S. Supreme Court entered an order staying a lower court order that prevented the U.S. Navy from reassigning 35 members of the Navy Surface Warfare Center, which includes 26 Navy SEALs2. Why? They refused to be vaccinated and claimed a religious exemption.
The religious exemption is that a small percentage of sailors, soldiers, airmen, and marines believe that they should not have to obey orders from Democratic Presidents. It’s the only realist conclusion one can make of the sudden religious furvor of anti-vaccine crazies upon finding their “internet research” was not going to beat actual science.
The Supreme Court’s order is worrisome in that it was not unanimous3. Three Justices, Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch — all theoretically textualists and/or originalists, dissented. Thomas, who dissents nearly a third of the time on everything, did not write an opinion, but Alito and Gorsuch did.
Their dissent could not get around this concept:
“Under Article II of the Constitution, the President of the United States, not any federal judge, is the Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces. In light of that bedrock constitutional principle, ‘courts traditionally have been reluctant to intrude upon the authority of the Executive in military and national security affairs.’”4
Associate Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote that in his concurrence to the majority’s order allowing the stay.
One would think Justice Alito would get that, he was in the U.S Army under three Commander in Chiefs - Nixon, Ford, and Carter.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COVID-19_pandemic_on_USS_Theodore_Roosevelt
https://www.scotusblog.com/2022/03/pentagon-seeks-relief-from-lower-court-order-that-blocked-redeployment-of-unvaccinated-navy-seals/
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/21pdf/21a477_1bo2.pdf
Ibid.