A Trump-appointed federal judge in Texas on Friday blocked the enforcement of the Biden Administration’s vaccine mandate for federal employees, stating that the mandate overstepped the authority of the nation’s top executive, the Washington Post reports.
U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Vincent Brown, a former clerk for now Texas governor Greg Abbott, rose to the federal bench with just 50 votes in the Senate after being nominated by Donald Trump, wrote that he didn’t know what the extent of executive power were, but that President Joe Biden’s mandate for employees to be vaccinated exceeds that limit.
“What is that limit? As the court has already noted, Congress appears … to have limited the President’s authority in this field to workplace conduct,” Brown wrote in his opinion, adding, “For its part, this court will say only this: however extensive that power is, the federal-worker mandate exceeds it.”