For the second time in a week, Republicans who have criticized President Biden’s vaccine-or-testing mandate are favorably citing a policy that looks suspiciously like it — and is actually tougher.

       Last week, it was Fox News’s Tucker Carlson pointing out that Fox’s own policy wasn’t technically a vaccine mandate, in that it allowed for a testing alternative. (Nevermind that he had attacked Biden’s similar policy and called it a vaccine mandate.)

       Now, it involves conservatives praising Delta Air Lines.

       Over the weekend, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) and others hailed Delta’s vaccination policy as proof that you don’t need mandates. Unlike the other major airlines, Delta has held out on mandating the vaccine for its employees, and CEO Ed Bastian recently announced that it had obtained a 90 percent vaccination rate.

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       The situation is tailor-made for conservative, mandate-skeptic news outlets and social media influencers, in that Bastian has cited the fact that “mandates are not the only way to get people vaccinated” and called such mandates a “very blunt instrument.” Bastian was invited on Fox Business Network late last week and made a similar point.

       Cruz this weekend said, “Bravo to ？@Delta？ for having the courage to say NO to the federal vaccine mandate. It’s the right thing to do — to respect the right of their employees to make their own personal decisions about their own healthcare.”

       Many others echoed a claim that Delta was “ditching” Biden’s mandate — the same word used in Fox Business’s report.

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       The first important point is that Delta hasn’t “ditched” anything. It has the same policy it has had since August; it merely hasn’t yet instituted a vaccine mandate like other airlines have.

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       But the other point is that its policy is actually tougher than the one Biden has announced for large businesses like it.

       Back in August, even before Biden announced his policy, Delta said that it would require employees to either get vaccinated or submit to weekly testing. Those are the cornerstones of what Biden would announce a couple weeks later.

       Delta actually went further than Biden’s later-announced policy — in instituting a penalty for failure to get vaccinated. In addition to having to undergo weekly testing, employees who declined to get vaccinated would also have to pay a $200-per-month health insurance surcharge. Bloomberg News reported it was the first major company to institute an effective fine for lack of a vaccination.

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       “The average hospital stay for covid-19 has cost Delta $50,000 per person,” Bastian said at the time. “This surcharge will be necessary to address the financial risk the decision to not vaccinate is creating for our company.”

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       At the time, some conservatives criticized this surcharge as coercion; today, the overall policy is being hailed as an example of what you can do without a mandate.

       This $200 penalty, of course, remains unmentioned in much of the conservative praise for Delta’s policy (as is the weekly testing requirement) — as if this is merely the product of people being given a pat on the back toward their local vaccination clinic.

       Also often unstated is the fact that Delta employees might know such a firm vaccine mandate is just around the corner. Biden has ordered government contractors like Delta to have their employees vaccinated by Dec. 8. Bastian has said Delta will abide by such a requirement.

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       But also consider the disparate impact of the policies between it and the first airline to institute a vaccine mandate: United. United announced last month that more than 99 percent of its employees had been vaccinated by its Sept. 27 deadline. After the deadline, that number rose to 99.5 percent, as people continued to upload their vaccination cards. This after Republicans decried such vaccine mandates as wrong because they would supposedly be counterproductive by causing vaccine skeptics to dig in.

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       Delta’s vaccination rate is high, but it’s still well shy of United’s, and many other companies and institutions with actual mandates have significantly higher vaccination rates. Delta also did this, we’ll reinforce, with a punitive measure that went further than the Biden policy that has been attacked on the right.

       If nothing else, the example of Delta seems to reinforce that blunt instruments can be effective in getting people vaccinated — even as blunter ones are indeed more effective.

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       It also suggests that, whatever one thinks of the propriety of such mandates, they seem to be moving the Overton window, a term for expanding the political discussion. Suddenly, Biden’s policy for large businesses (the actual one, which isn’t truly a vaccine mandate despite what its critics have said) and even some policies that go further (like Delta’s surcharge and Fox’s daily-testing alternative) are being held up as more acceptable middle-grounds.

       As evidenced by the following tweet by Cruz’s former chief of staff, Rep. Chip Roy (R-Tex.):