Knox County Mayor Glenn Jacobs put U.S. President Joe Biden on notice Thursday regarding one of the president’s COVID-19 mandates and said his county will flatly refuse to obey.
Specifically, Jacobs said Knox County will not honor Biden’s executive order mandating that all businesses with 100 or more employees require COVID-19 vaccines for workers or implement weekly testing.
Jacobs wrote this in a letter that he addressed to Biden’s office at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
“As the chief executive of an organization that employs 2,700 individuals, your action adds financial, legal, and regulatory burdens that will ultimately impact Knox County taxpayers. In addition, it potentially hinders our ability to attract quality employees since many folks in our community will not work somewhere that unjustly imposes vaccine mandates,” Jacobs wrote to Biden.
“As a fellow elected official who has sworn an oath the uphold the U.S. Constitution just as you have, I am alarmed by the alacrity with which you issued this order, contradicting both Article I, Section 1 — which vests legislative power in the Congress — and the Tenth Amendment — which recognizes the sovereignty of the states or the people over matters the Constitution does not delegate to the federal government.”
Jacobs also told Biden that elected officials cannot ignore, disregard, or contravene the laws that bind them.
“Recently I attended the memorial service for one of our armed forces service members killed in the August 26 suicide bombing attack in Kabul, Afghanistan. We are told that this young patriot, like so many before him, died in defense of our freedoms. But is this statement actually true? Is it an expression of solemn gratitude and a debt that we can never pay? Or is it simply a hollow platitude we recite to rationalize the loss of our best and brightest?” Jacobs asked.
“If it is the latter — if it is not about freedom — then we need to be honest with ourselves: we are not the country — nor the people — we claim to be, and we need to figure out what this nation really stands for. In Knox County, we know what we stand for. We stand for freedom. We stand for the rule of law. We stand for the Constitution. And you can rest assured that we will stand against your blatant and egregious executive overreach.”
Jacobs, in April of last year, warned that a mental health crisis would follow Tennessee Governor Bill Lee’s-then statewide shutdown as a means to slow the spread of COVID-19.
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Chris Butler is an investigative journalist at The Tennessee Star. Follow Chris on Facebook. Email tips to [email protected].
Photo “Mayor Glenn Jacobs” by Jacobs for Mayor.
