Scared SCOTless

Oral arguments reveal histrionic mania on the bench.

Edit, Jan 13: Happily, I was mostly wrong.

The stay, I feel, will not be granted.

Keller, representing the National Federation of Independent Business’s request for a stay of the OSHA mandate, dutifully outlined why a full-fledged challenge to the mandate was likely to succeed on the merits in any sane world.

To the elders on the other end of the teleconference, his lack of appreciation for the scale of disaster facing the country was incomprehensible. The justices, as brainwashed as any mainstream media consumer pulled off the street, expressed universal (edit: not universal, upon review; see below), palpable terror over the virus and fervor for the nonfunctional vaccines.

Keller’s attempts to frame the absurdity of the timing of OSHA’s issuance of the mandate fell flat. He may have scored on the impossibility of implementing the mandate in the given time frame - here the shortage of testing was a strong point. But this is unlikely to make much difference in an appraisal of likelihood to win the full case.

Ten times as many cases as when OSHA issued the mandate! The hospitals are fuller than ever! It’s Omicromageddon!

Keller’s real target, of course, was the one he could not attack: The absurdity of calling this Pandemic “unprecedented.” (Edit: On review, there was at least a bit of pushback from this from the steadfast Gorsuch, who countered with the examples of polio and the flu. Kavanaugh and Barrett were ambivalent. Apologies for shipping the post in a below-par nuance form.)

Americans have lived and worked with viral outbreaks entirely comparable to this one; and our non-viral diseases, fueled by lifestyle and pollution, are of an order of magnitude more deadly than any of those (and many deaths listing “Covid 19” are of course merely deaths from those other diseases). This “pandemic” is merely a catastrophized version of regular life. Yet when Solicitor General Prelogar, arguing for the state, casually and perfunctorily portrayed this overhyped menace as an “unprecedented” crisis - a sickening demonstration of how easily any society can revoke all norms and rights over the flimsiest of pretenses at any moment - she was several footsteps behind the justices themselves in delusion.

Keller might as well have been arguing his case to the Biden administration itself.