Opinion Linda Greenhouse. Jan. 17, 2022: “Halfway through their pained dissent from the Supreme Court’s decision blocking the Biden administration’s workplace Covid vaccine rule, the court’s three liberal justices made a glancing reference to a now-obscure case from 1981, American Textile Manufacturers Institute v. Donovan. It was one of the court’s first efforts to interpret the 1970 law that created the Occupational Safety and Health Administration….That case stands for a time when the Supreme Court was willing to rescue an administrative agency’s authority from the storms of politics. Was that the dissenters’ point in citing it? I don’t know, but what jumped off the page to me was the contrast between how the court behaved in 1981 and what happened last Thursday in National Federation of Independent Business v. Department of Labor, when six justices yielded to politics to disable an agency from carrying out its statutory mission to protect the health and safety of the American work force. That is where we are now. That’s how far the court has fallen…”