Amy Coney Barrett Actually Did Something Good This Week

Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett actually did a good thing this week by refusing to take up a case involving Indiana University's vaccine mandate. Students had challenged the mandate in court, but Barrett shut it down without a second thought. This was a surprising move by the conservative justice, but it was the right decision to make in order to protect students on college campuses. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains what's happening.

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*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.

Supreme Court justice Amy Coney Barrett is currently under attack from Republicans with them now calling her Amy Commie Barrett all because she rejected an emergency request from students at Indiana University who filed a lawsuit against their college because the college is requiring proof of vaccination to come back on campus with the exception, by the way, the University did carve out exceptions for people with religious or medical issues. If you have a religious objection to these vaccines, you do not have to get them and you can still go to the school. If you have a health issue that, that makes it to where you can't get the vaccine, the school says that's okay, you're still allowed to come. For everybody else that has no excuse, no reason whatsoever, you have to get the vaccine in order to come back onto campus. Eight students filed a lawsuit two months ago, went to the Supreme Court this week, filed for an emergency hearing.

And Amy Coney Barrett without even getting a full review from the rest of the court said, hell no, not happening. This was a good decision by Amy Coney Barrett and I'm surprised that those words are coming out of my mouth. But let's be honest, she did the right thing here. College campuses are going to become, much like public schools, hotbeds of COVID infections once classes resume. And we know that because we're already seeing massive COVID outbreaks in schools where students have already returned. I know I can speak personally to this. The county next door to me has already had several schools report massive outbreaks of COVID, some reporting dozens and dozens and dozens of cases of COVID teachers being quarantined, not able to go to their classes. We're actually running out of teachers and substitutes now in that county.

And of course in my county, because yesterday it was reported that 65 in my county are now in quarantine because of positive COVID diagnoses. And the same thing is going to happen on college campuses. Now, as we all know, just getting the vaccine is not going to prevent you from getting COVID. But statistically, what it is going to do is make the symptoms less severe, reduce your chance of being hospitalized and certainly reduce your chances of dying from this disease. So college campuses, not just Indiana University, but all over this country are putting these same kinds of mandates in place. Some of them are saying, okay, if you don't want to get the vaccine, you have to submit to testing several times per week. A lot of private businesses here in the United States are doing the exact same thing, either fully vaccinated or fully vaccinated or testing several times a week because that's what needs to happen.

We finally have to get a handle on this thing before it stays out there long enough to continue to mutate and then we end up with variants that are no longer effected by our vaccines. Then we're back to square one, back to lockdowns, back to not being able to have anything open, back to rampant joblessness, back to all of the horrible things we saw in the early days of the pandemic. We're headed there now. We're headed there now and Amy Coney Barrett to her credit had enough good sense to say, if I can help in this one situation I'm going to do it. Who knows what her reasoning was, who knows what her logic is.