Texas, along with a "large number of Republican states," will end up challenging President Joe Biden's extensive vaccine mandate, particularly the part that requires businesses employing 100 or more people to make their employees get a COVID-19 vaccine, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said Tuesday on Newsmax.
"We don't think the president has the authority to do that," Paxton said on Newsmax's "National Report." "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 added that he doesn't understand 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.
The attorney general, meanwhile, said he thinks Biden's mandates, as well as the president's trip to California to stump for Gov. Gavin Newsom just before Tuesday's recall election.
"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?"
Paxton on Tuesday also said that the Texas Facilities Commission will likely award the state contract for construction on a 700-mile stretch of border wall sometime this month.
However, he said he also finds it "really interesting" that Biden is focused on telling Americans they need to have a COVID-19 vaccine while "hundreds of thousands of people" are coming across the southern border every month, with many of them potentially having the disease.
"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 can come in the country and move them around to spread COVID other ways," the attorney general said.
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Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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