Arizona Rep. Andy Biggs Introduces Bill To Abolish OSHA

P. Gardner Goldsmith | January 25, 2022
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In response to Joe Biden’s attempt to use the agency to enforce his jab-or-be-tested-at-your-own-expense mandate on private businesses with 100 or more employees – a move that last week was struck down by the Supreme Court merely because Congress hadn’t expanded the bureau’s unconstitutional power to add that insult – Arizona Congressman Andy Biggs (R), has introduced HB 5813, a new bill to completely defund the Occupational Safety and Health Administration.

It’s called the “NOSHA” (an anagram for “Nullify Occupational Safety and Health Administration”) Act, and, is cosponsored by Congressmen Chip Roy (R-TX), Thomas Massie (R-KY), Matt Gaetz (R-FLA), Ralph Norman (R-SC), Mary E. Miller (R-IL), Scott Perry (R-PA), and Louie Gohmert (R-TX).

Curiously, there appears to be a marked dearth of “my-body-my-choice” Democrats – or any Democrats at all – on the list.

And, as Peter Rykowski writes for The New American, the magazine recently spoke with Massie and highlight some of this thoughts both about the bill and about the Biden edicts.

Said Massie:

One of the most troubling things about Biden’s … unconstitutional vaccine mandates that have been stopped by the courts is that the agencies who were tasked with enforcing them did not even question the fact that they were illegal. He told them to do something that was illegal they carried it out, and they carried it out until the courts stopped them.

It’s almost Orwellian. The very agency that’s supposed to protect you from your employer doing something to you that you don’t want is forcing you to have your employer do something to you that you don’t want.

But there’s another dimension to this issue, which is the fact that OSHA, which was created in 1970 at Richard Nixon’s adamant insistence, and operates under the umbrella of the Labor Department, started in 1913 under Taft, is not only unconstitutional, the Labor Department itself is not sanctioned by the US Constitution, and it gets worse.

Related: Biden’s Supply-Chain Strangler: The Jab Mandate For Incoming Foreign Truckers Begins | MRCTV

As I’ve told students in my economics and ethics classes, and as James Madison tried to warn, the feds created and the judiciary illegitimately okayed, the Labor Department by dreamily misreading the Interstate Commerce Clause of the U.S. Constitution (Article One, Section Eight). In part, that clause claims for the Congress the power to:

...regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes…

Note that the word “States” is capitalized. That’s because the clause was written to make the US one big free trade zone, allowing Congress to provide remedies for trade-tariff disputes between the States as political entities, not to let politician control the voluntary trades of individuals in those states.

As Madison said in 1829 about the clause:

Yet it is very certain that it grew out of the abuse of the power by the importing States in taxing the nonimporting, and was intended as a negative and preventive provision against injustice among the States themselves, rather than as a power to be used for the positive purposes of the General Government, in which alone, however, the remedial power could be lodged.

And, even if the Constitution were amended to allow the feds to “have” the shockingly authoritarian power of telling peaceful buyers and sellers – of goods, or of services, as employees, hirers, consumers, or any other form of commercial transaction – it should be pointed out that Congressman Massie’s statement can be further explored.

The Labor Department and OSHA do not “protect” anyone.

They use other people’s money, taken via the thievery of taxation, and threaten people – always.

Whether those people are operating their businesses in a way one does not like is not relevant, either to the fact that the entire Labor Department is not sanctioned by the Constitution, or to the fact that even if the Constitution DID allow it, the act of telling other people they can only enter into peaceful work contracts according to YOUR dictates is highly immoral.

There have been a lot of mob movies about that.

The NOSHA Act is pending in the U.S. House Committee on Education and Labor, and it unlikely to pass, but it offers us a chance to reflect on the long and sorry history of the Labor Department, the vile way its boosters misread the Constitution, and the deep, poisonous roots of aggression that feed its entire ideological support system.

Just because OSHA is in the news now, because of the jab mandates, Americans should not turn away from the deeper realities when the mandates are tossed.

Related: Even History Of OSHA Edicts Likely Won’t Support Biden’s Jab Mandate | MRCTV


(Cover Photo: Gage Skidmore)

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