Even as Mayor Lori Lightfoot and others in Chicago’s elected Democratic leadership excoriated the U.S. Supreme Court for its decision last summer overturning Roe v Wade, lawyers for the city have seized on that decision to back their assertions the so-called “right to bodily autonomy” courts cited for decades to uphold abortion rights should not also extend to those seeking to defeat Covid vaccine mandates.
On Feb. 8, lawyers representing the city of Chicago filed a brief in Chicago federal court, urging a federal judge to put an end to the lawsuit brought by city workers who claimed the city wrongly forced them to choose between taking a Covid jab or keeping their jobs.
The Chicago city workers have been in court against Lightfoot and City Hall since 2021, when the city first imposed its Covid vaccine mandate, threatening to fire those who did not comply. The lawsuit also named Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker as a defendant, for his role in imposing the mandates on public workers in Illinois, in general.
The Chicago city worker lawsuit came among a flurry of similar litigation brought by firefighters and other public workers against the city, the state and other state and local governmental bodies and officials.
The plaintiffs all pressed similar claims, asserting the vaccine mandates violated government workers’ constitutional rights to due process, bodily autonomy and freedom of religion, among other constitutional violations.
They also alleged the mandates violated their conscience rights under state law.
In all of the cases thus far, judges refused to impose injunctions blocking the various government officials and agencies from enforcing the Covid vaccine mandates.
Plaintiffs appealed those decisions, but found no relief from the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals. In the summer of 2022, appellate judges agreed that the scientific case for the vaccine mandates was growing gradually weaker as real world observations and research indicated the Covid vaccines approved by the Food and Drug Administration did not actually prevent infection or transmission of the coronavirus that causes Covid-19.
However, the appellate judges said even that was not enough to compel the courts to strike down the mandates at this point, because the mandates did not violate any fundamental rights, in part, because the mandates were imposed as a condition of employment.
The appeals court sent the matter back to Chicago federal district court for further proceedings on the core questions in the lawsuits.
However, months later, both the city of Chicago and Gov. Pritzker have asked the court to go further, and put an end to the cases altogether,
Lawyers for Pritzker filed a motion to dismiss on Feb. 1.
That was followed a week later by the city’s motion, which argues the plaintiffs fall short on every one of their constitutional claims.
The city asserts the workers’ religious freedom claims under the First Amendment fail because the city offered a chance for workers to apply for a religious exemption to the mandates, even though workers claimed the city wrongly denied a number of those exemption requests.
In response to those assertions, the city said most of the named plaintiffs in the action did not seek a religious exemption under the city’s policy, and the city did not believe most workers could identify “sincerely held religious belief” that would demonstrate a “conflict between the tenets of their faith and COVID-19 vaccinations.”
The city further argued the workers’ claims concerning violations of their rights to privacy and bodily autonomy under the 14th Amendment also could not hold up.
The city pointed to the Seventh Circuit’s decision, which they said “clearly held that the 14th Amendment allegations were legally deficient on their face and failed as a matter of law.”
But further, the city said the plaintiffs’ claims the city violated a “substantive due process right to ‘bodily autonomy’ under Roe v Wade” is particularly eviscerated by the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Org.
In that decision, a 6-3 majority on the high court ruled previous courts had incorrectly determined the 14th Amendment established a right to abortion, under the umbrella of a constitutional right to privacy. The court therefore struck down Roe v Wade and later cases that further defined those rights.
Democrats across the country, including Pritzker, Lightfoot and others who imposed and vigorously defended Covid vaccine mandates, loudly criticized the decision, saying they believed the reasoning in Dobbs represented a misreading of the U.S. Constitution, arising out of a desire to simply strip constitutional rights from women and others.
Lightfoot particularly railed against the decision and its author, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, calling the decision a “call to arms” for progressives, and declaring at a public event: “F*** Clarence Thomas.”
Despite such strong assertions, the city Lightfoot leads said the Dobbs decision should also end legal challenges to the mayor’s power to impose vaccine mandates on city workers.
“Plaintiffs’ prior argument that the Vaccination Policy infringed on a substantive due process right to ‘bodily autonomy’ under Roe v. Wade and Planned Parenthood Se. Pennsylvania v. Casey, has now been conclusively foreclosed by Dobbs… so the legal basis upon which their substantive due process claims depended is even less sound,” the city argued.
The city has been represented by attorneys Michael A. Warner Jr., William R. Pokorny and Erin K. Walsh, of the firm of Franczek P.C., of Chicago.