When the Criteria is Ideology

 

When the Criteria is Ideology

Justice Sotomayor may be on the brink of dissolving into a nice old lady. This is from a Reason article on the recent constitutional question of the Biden vaccine mandate:

'On Friday, when the Supreme Court considered whether it should block enforcement of the Biden administration’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for private employers, most of the discussion focused on whether the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) has the statutory authority to issue that rule. But the justices and lawyers also touched on a constitutional argument against the mandate, one that hinges on the distinction between state and federal powers.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor claimed not to understand this distinction.

OSHA’s “emergency temporary standard” (ETS), which it published on November 5, demands that companies with 100 or more employees require them to be vaccinated or wear face masks and submit to weekly virus testing. While arguing that OSHA does not have the power to issue such an order, Ohio Solicitor General Benjamin Flowers said “there may be many states, subject to their own state laws, that could impose this [policy] themselves.” Sotomayor said she found that concession puzzling.

“If it’s within the police power to protect the health and welfare of workers,” she said, “you seem to be saying the states can do it, but you’re saying the federal government can’t, even though it’s facing the same crisis in interstate commerce that states are facing within their own borders. I’m not sure I understand the distinction—why the states would have the power but the federal government wouldn’t.”

Flowers noted that “the federal government has no police power”—the general authority to enact legislation aimed at protecting public health, safety, morals, and welfare. While states retain that broad authority under the Constitution, the federal government is limited to specifically enumerated powers. This principle is reflected in the 10th Amendment, which says “the powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”
…..
Sotomayor’s reference to a federal “police power” was not quite as striking as her false claims about the omicron variant’s impact on children. But her exchange with Flowers raised some eyebrows.

“Sotomayor professed not to be able to understand the distinction between federal authority and state police powers,” National Review‘s Isaac Schorr wrote. “Sotomayor claims not to understand [the] distinction between state and federal power,” Ilya Shapiro, director of the Cato Institute’s Robert A. Levy Center for Constitutional Studies, tweeted. “Mind-boggling. Calls OSHA’s regulatory authority…a ‘police power.’ OH SG tries to explain con law 101, eventually, Roberts rescues the embarrassing discourse.”'

Why are these demanding positions, so crucial to the democracy, so hard to fill with able people?