Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said Tuesday that in the end, Texas, along with a “large number of Republican states,” will be challenging President Joe Biden’s sweeping vaccine mandate, particularly the part that mandate businesses that have 100 or more employees to require their employees to either get the COVID-19 vaccine or be tested on a weekly basis.
“We don’t think the president has the authority to do that,” Paxton said. “He’s just making up law, which he seems to be pretty good at these days, and so we will challenge them. Not just Texas, but I think you’ll see a large number of Republican states, particularly, that will say no, you can’t do this to our people. You have to go through Congress and make sure that they follow the Constitution. The president can’t just order this by edict.”
Paxton stated that he can’t grasp how Biden and former President Barack Obama can look at the law and say they will create their own laws.
“It’s a power thing, and it’s really important, whether you’re a Democrat or Republican, that the Constitution be followed because it’s our elected representatives that we put in place that are supposed to make these types of decisions,” said Paxton.
“There’s nothing more important than getting these Americans out of Afghanistan or other people that have helped our troops while they were over there who are now at a great risk,” said Paxton. “Yet all of a sudden out of the blue, after this disaster in Afghanistan…you see a shift to focusing on something that they had promised, all of them, would never happen,” said Paxton. “So, you have to ask the question, how did we shift away from something so important where we have American lives at risk to this vaccine mandate all of a sudden?”
On Tuesday Paxton said that later this month the Texas Facilities Commission will likely award the state contract for construction on a 700-mile stretch of border.
He said he finds it “really interesting” that Biden is insisting that Americans get the COVID-19 vaccine while “hundreds of thousands of people” are coming across the southern border every month, many of them COVID positive.
“He is inviting them in and he’s moving them around the country, so it does seem very inconsistent to me to be so focused on ordering mandates for Americans, and yet he lets all these people come into the country and move them around to spread COVID other ways,” the attorney general said.
