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Biden Admin Suspends Enforcement Of CMS Mandate Following Court Order

   DailyWire.com
U.S. President Joe Biden speaks while visiting the National Institutes of Health (NIH) in Bethesda, Maryland, U.S., on Thursday, Dec. 2, 2021. Biden sketched out his latest plan to quell the pandemic that's dogged his presidency, with two U.S. cases of the omicron variant now confirmed and threatening to fuel an already high case count.
Oliver Contreras / Sipa / Bloomberg via Getty Images

The Department of Health and Human Services’ (HHS) Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) announced on Thursday that it was suspending the enforcement of Democrat President Joe Biden’s vaccine mandate after a federal court blocked it from being implemented pending review.

In a memo, CMS stated:

Survey and Enforcement of the Vaccine Requirement for Health Care Staff in Medicare- and Medicaid-certified Providers and Suppliers Suspended While Court Ordered Injunctions are in Effect: The Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) will not enforce the new rule regarding vaccination of health care workers or requirements for policies and procedures in certified Medicare/Medicaid providers and suppliers (including nursing facilities, hospitals, dialysis facilities and all other provider types covered by the rule) while there are court-ordered injunctions in place prohibiting enforcement of this provision.

“On November 29 and November 30, 2021, the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri and United States District Court for the Western District of Louisiana issued preliminary injunctions against the implementation and enforcement of the Interim Final Rule against Medicare-and-Medicaid-certified providers and suppliers,” the memo said. “Between the two of them, these injunctions cover all states, the District of Columbia and the U.S. Territories.”

“While CMS remains confident in its authority to protect the health and safety of patients in facilities certified by the Medicare and Medicaid programs, it has suspended activities related to the implementation and enforcement of this rule pending future developments in the litigation,” the memo continued. “Accordingly, while these preliminary injunctions are in effect, surveyors must not survey providers for compliance with the requirements of the Interim Final Rule.”

Louisiana Western District U.S. Judge Terry Doughty wrote yesterday in his ruling that “if the separation of powers meant anything to the Constitutional framers, it meant that the three necessary ingredients to deprive a person of liberty or property – the power to make rules, to enforce them, and to judge their violations – could never fall into the same hands.”

“If the executive branch is allowed to usurp the power of the legislative branch to make laws, two of the three powers conferred by our Constitution would be in the same hands. If human nature and history teach anything, it is that civil liberties face grave risks when governments proclaim indefinite states of emergency,” he continued. “During a pandemic such as this one, it is even more important to safeguard the separation of powers set forth in our Constitution to avoid erosion of our liberties. Because the Plaintiff States have satisfied all four elements required for a preliminary injunction to issue, this Court has determined that a preliminary injunction should issue against the Government Defendants.”

Related:

This report has been updated to include additional information. 

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