Joe Biden needs a serious lesson in federalism. Here’s hoping he gets it sooner rather than later.

We’re speaking, of course, about the vaccination mandate he announced last Thursday — a mandate that far more astute legal minds than this one believe is unconstitutional.

Take National Review’s Andrew McCarthy, for example. “There is no general federal health-care power,” he writes. “The constitutional exhortation for Congress to ‘provide for … the general Welfare of the United States’ (art. I, sec. 8) is not an open-ended authorization. Ours is a federalist system, the states presumptively govern their internal affairs, and Congress’s power to provide for the general welfare is cabined by its enumerated powers.”

If the Supreme Court wasn’t willing to approve a federal mandate to purchase health insurance in its 2012 ObamaCare ruling, then it’s unlikely to approve a similar mandate forcing the citizenry to inject a foreign substance into their bodies. At least, that’s the theory.

But we’ve seen the Roberts Court at work. We’ve seen the chief justice himself rewrite ObamaCare in order to save it by infamously insisting that its “penalty” for not purchasing health insurance was really a “tax,” even though Congress and the Obama administration had insisted all along that it wasn’t a tax. And we’ve seen ostensibly conservative justices go soft and bow to Big Government once they got a taste of that DC cocktail circuit. When it comes to the High Court, we trust Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, and precious little else.

Biden’s vaccination mandate applies to all businesses with 100 or more employees, and it applies to all executive branch employees within the federal government, but it doesn’t apply to the legislative or the judicial branches. Thus, Joe Biden will use the power of the state to stick you, but Nancy Pelosi and her staff are free to make their own healthcare decisions.

Oh, and illegal immigrants are also free to make their own healthcare decisions:

DOOCY: Vaccines are required for “people at a business with more than 100 people. It is not a requirement for migrants at the border. Why?”@PressSec: “That’s correct”

moves to the next question pic.twitter.com/GK7YQraDS5

— Daily Caller (@DailyCaller) September 10, 2021

U.S. Senate candidate from Ohio and Hillbilly Elegy author J.D. Vance believes a bit of civil disobedience is in order. “I have a simple message for America’s business community,” he wrote in response to Biden’s announcement. “DO NOT COMPLY. Do not comply with the government mandates. Do not pay the government fines. Don’t allow yourself to be bullied and controlled. Only mass civil disobedience will save us from Joe Biden’s naked authoritarianism.”

As for the states, there seems to be a fighting spirit among Republican governors, too. Perhaps no one said it better than Missouri’s Mike Parsons:

The Biden Administration’s recent announcement seeking to dictate personal freedom and private business decisions is an insult to our American principles of individual liberty and free enterprise. This heavy-handed action by the federal government is unwelcome in our state and has potentially dangerous consequences for working families. Vaccination protects us from serious illness, but the decision to get vaccinated is a private health care decision that should remain as such. My administration will always fight back against federal power grabs and government overreach that threatens to limit our freedoms.“

No one, that is, with the possible exception of South Carolina’s Henry McMaster:

The American Dream has turned into a nightmare under President Biden and the radical Democrats. They have declared war against capitalism, thumbed their noses at the Constitution, and empowered our enemies abroad. Rest assured, we will fight them to the gates of hell to protect the liberty and livelihood of every South Carolinian.

To the gates of hell, eh? Talk is certainly cheap, but those are fightin’ words. And it’s good to see them being uttered by a Republican governor.