WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court on Friday blocked a lower court order preventing the Navy from restricting the deployment of Navy SEALs who refuse to receive a COVID vaccine.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin had urged the court to address what he called an “extraordinary and unprecedented interference in essential military affairs” unprecedented in American history.
A federal judge in Texas ruled in early January that the Navy should allow members of the elite special operations community to opt out of the vaccine requirement if they have religious objections. But his order went further, forbidding commanders to make any changes to their military missions based on a refusal to vaccinate.
On Friday, the Supreme Court blocked the judge’s order “insofar as it prevents the Navy from making deployment, commissioning, and other operations decisions.” This frees the Navy to issue deployment orders based on the status of the Covid vaccination.
Three justices – Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch – said they would have denied the Navy’s request.
In a separate dissenting opinion for him and Gorsuch, Alito said the court sealed the Navy’s application, resulting in a “great injustice” to the sailors.
“It appears that these individuals were poorly treated by the Navy,” he said.
Judge Brett Kavanaugh said he agreed with Friday’s Supreme Court order. Under the Constitution, he said, “the President of the United States, and not any federal judge, is the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces.” Kavanaugh said the judge in this case improperly inserted himself into the military chain of command.
Austin said this restriction usurped the Navy’s authority to decide when military personnel should be deployed to carry out some of the most sensitive and dangerous military missions. It required commanders to assign missions to military personnel “regardless of their lack of vaccinations, despite the military commanders’ judgment that doing so posed intolerable risks to safety and mission success.”
The Pentagon said the Navy had already sent a member of the SEAL team to a mission on a submarine against the wishes of the commanders.
U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor issued the order Jan. 3 in a lawsuit brought by 35 members of the Navy’s Special Forces, including 26 servicemen, who said the mandatory vaccination policy violated their religious freedom. The Navy provides a religious adaptation, but it is by all accounts a theater. The Navy has not granted a religious exemption for any vaccine in recent memory. It’s just a rubber stamp on all denial.”
On February 28, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit refused to block O’Connor’s order.
By agreeing to the Navy’s request to block the order, the Supreme Court will likely have done the case for the Navy officer driving a guided missile destroyer. He filed a judicial challenge similar to the vaccine requirements, and US District Judge Stephen Merida of Florida, like O’Connor, found that the vaccine order violated religious freedom and prevented the Navy from taking any adverse action against the officer.
Because the Navy considered the officer a threat to the health of the crew, it prevented the ship from being deployed, with its 320-man crew.
The Supreme Court has always been highly respectful of military rulings on deployments. In the 1973 case, she said, it was difficult to imagine an area of government activity in which the courts would have less jurisdiction than “complex, nuanced, and professional decisions regarding force formation, training, equipping, and control.”
In a 1986 case, the court said that the essence of military service “is to subordinate one’s desires and interests to the needs of the service.”
[ad_2]
