I admit I haven’t seen the actual ruling yet, just this story on the AP.
Well duh. :rolleyes:
I hope to god the appeals court or supreme court still uphold it.
And I hope Roberts doesn’t have second thoughts.
Fuck that judge sideways and fuck “Individual 1” for not defending it after he lied to his fans/voters/MAGAts/deplorables that he wanted to leave it in place. Of course I was sure that was a lie even back then, and a lot of his MAGAts probably cheer the idea of those with diabetes, heart disease, and cancer being thrown on the side of the road to die on a piece of cardboard, but some of them actually believed him. How can they not see it? Even now they don’t.
A lot of the diehard MAGA types are on medicare and are happy to be on medicare.
However the ones I’ve met think the program should be abolished after they die. Fuck their children I guess.
I’ll never understand the mentality.
On the other hand, the news that Democrats are going to win the White House and the Senate in a landslide two years from now is a silver lining.
This ruling was released right at the end of the enrollment period, which is the busiest time. It was calculated to make people think they shouldn’t bother.
I don’t understand the legal basis of this ruling.
As originally passed, the individual mandate in the ACA was enforced by requiring those who were uninsured to pay a fine/fee/tax. The Supreme Court held that this was constitutional under Congress’ power to levy taxes. Since then, Congress lowered the fine/fee/tax to zero as part of Trump’s tax bill. The District Court in Texas just ruled that, with a fine/fee/tax of zero, Congress lost its authority to have an individual mandate under its taxing authority, because with a zero rate it’s no longer a tax. The court also ruled that without the individual mandate, the whole law falls apart, so the whole thing is invalid.
It seems to me that, with a fine/fee/tax of zero, the so-called individual mandate isn’t a mandate at all. That is, without an enforcement mechanism, the so-called mandate is merely a suggestion. As far as I know, that’s the only part of the ACA that depends on the authority to tax. Yet the court threw the whole thing out.
You could make a good case that the ACA won’t work well without the mandate. In fact, I believe that’s what Republicans were hoping for when they eliminated it; that the ACA would eventually collapse without it. Whatever the thinking behind it, though, that’s the law that Congress passed. That the law won’t work well is not an argument for declaring it unconstitutional. What is it about the individual mandate that this court claims turns the rest of the ACA from an unconstitutional law into a constitutional one?
It’s so dumb. He ruled that Congress wouldn’t have kept the whole law without the mandate, so without the mandate, the whole law must go.
Exact Congress literally did that exact thing, by leaving everything else intact and stripping the mandate of any effect.
The legislative fix is, I think, very simple. All it needs is a simple severability clause. Nancy Pelosi should provide no votes for an appropriation bill that doesn’t insert one into the law, which would void this decision immediately.
this is going to get overturned in a month or less simply because the scotus said it was legal
.ust because this hick judge thinks he found an end run around the highest court in America dosent meat its gonna stand
I’m sure that somewhere in DC, right now, Roberts is facepalming and saying to himself “I thought we already told you twice about this shit.”
Link to the decision (55 page pdf) in Texas, et al. v. United States, et al., Defendants, California, et al., California, et al. Intervenor-Defendants
A group of Attorneys General from Republican leaning states sued in federal court arguing that the PPACA (often known as Obamacare) is unconstitutional since Congress repealed the tax penalty for not having insurance with the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. The federal government under the Trump administration declined to defend the PPACA as the named defendant. The court permitted California and other states to stand in place of the federal government to argue in defense of the PPACA as Defendant-Intervenors.
Previously the SCOTUS upheld the constitutionality of the PPACA in NFIB v. Sebelius under Congress’ taxing power. The sole legal reasoning used by the Roberts court to uphold the PPACA was the Congress’ authority to lay and collect taxes. Now that the tax has been repealed the federal court ruled that there is no valid authority to uphold the PPACA since the SCOTUS, under Part III-A of their decision in *NFIB *ruled that the PPACA could not be upheld under the Interstate Commerce Clause.
The real issue in the *Texas *case was whether the Individual Mandate is unconstitutional in the absence of the tax that was the basis for upholding the PPACA, and if so whether the Individual Mandate is severable from the rest of the PPACA. The Plaintiffs and Federal Defendants agreed that “the Individual Mandate is unconstitutional and inseverable from the [PP]ACA’s pre-existing-condition provisions.” However the Intervenor Defendants did not agree that the Individual Mandate is unconstitutional and inseverable from the pre-existing condition mandate. The decision in *Texas *focused on the severability question.
Judge O’Çonnor in *Texas *cites Ginsburg in concluding that the Individual Mandate is not severable from the rest of the PPACA:
Concluding that the Individual Mandate is not constitutional on its own and that it is not severable from the rest of the PPACA, Judge O’Connor ruled the entire PPACA is unconstitutional. He quotes extensively from the *NFIB *majority in reaching his conclusions. This would be a tough one for the Fifth Circuit or SCOTUS to overrule.
Judge O’Çonnor addresses this quite extensively in his ruling in the *Texas *case.
My own analogy is to imagine this situation:
Law 1 provides “motorists must come to a complete stop at STOP signs.”
Law 2 provides that “a payment of $200 is due if a motorist fails to come to a complete STOP at a stop sign.”
All good so far. But if a later legislature amends Law 2 to read “a payment of $0 is due if a motorist fails to come to a complete STOP at a stop sign.” that does not eliminate Law 1. There is still a requirement to to come to a complete STOP and indeed many people comply with laws with no enforcement mechanisms. A law without an enforcement mechanism is still a law. And if it may be a basis for standing in court if relevant standards are met.
This is more the meat of O’Connor’s decision. He notes that within the text of the PPACA many times Congress refers to the Individual Mandate provision as essential. The SCOTUS decisions in both NFIB and *KING *repeatedly refer to the Individual mandate in the same terms.
In order for an unconstitutional provision to be severable (could be eliminated but leave the rest of the law intact) the court must look to legislative intent. In short, Would the legislature have enacted the other parts of the law knowing that the Indivudual Mandate is unconstitutional?
Again within the text of the PPACA and SCOTUS precedents it is noted that similar health insurance regulatory reforms in several states proved untenable without an Individual Mandate provision. Insurance premiums “skyrocketed” and resulted in “death spirals” with massive cost shifting by requiring insurance companies to accept customers with pre-existing conditions but not require health individuals to sign up. O’Connor concluded that Congress specifically intended to avoid such an outcome and that they would not have implemented the various other provisions of the PPACA without the Individual Mandate.
As to an appeal of O’Connor’s ruling… an attack on Standing is one avenue. Though the cases is titled as Texas et al. v United States et al. the standing issue was decided on a finding that two individual plaintiffs had standing. (In accordance with precedent judge O’Connor did not analyze whether Texas and the other state plaintiffs had standing.) California and the other Defendant-Intervenors argued that these individuals do not have standing reasoning that without an enforcement mechanism they are not harmed by the PPACA. O’Connor disagreed and cited precedent extensively on that point.
Isn’t the question of severability about whether the courts can declare one part of a law invalid while letting the rest of the law stand? In this case, it’s Congress (not the courts) that eliminated the individual mandate by setting the tax to zero. Judge O’Connor is applying the question of severability to Congress.
I’m not a lawyer, but this seems bizarre to me. One could argue that Congress amended the ACA in a bad way, but Congress has passed bad laws in the past, and the courts have been stuck with interpreting them. Unless a law is unconstitutional, aren’t courts supposed to do their best to interpret laws as passed, no matter how poorly written?
This whole thing seems like a Catch-22.
I don’t understand why Republicans are so against the ACA. People are required to have auto insurance before they can drive on public streets and get ticketed if they don’t have auto insurance. Health insurance should be treated the same way.
From my experience, a lot of them would realize this if they thought it through but their primary desire is to stick it to people they either dislike or just don’t give a damn about. It’s “angry drunk” logic, and this visceral feeling overrides the desire to reason and kill the thunder of their indignation.
Not sure if it will work that way. The GOP seems to have unlimited talent in getting elected even after debacles like this that will hurt millions of citizens.
Yeah, I have no faith in the American public after 2016. No matter what the GOP does, they don’t lose votes because of it.
Roy Moore abused his power as DA to sexually abuse children, and he almost became a senator.
Severability is a long standing issue with plenty of precedent. Sometimes legislation is written with specific severability provisions and the PPACA was no exception. The PPACA had a provision under 42 U.S. Code § 1303 that if the Medicaid Expansion was deemed unconstitutional that in that case the intent of Congress was that the unconstitutional portion should be severed and the rest of the law left intact. And that is exactly what SCOTUS did when they found the mandatory Medicaid Expansion unconstitutional.
The converse, of course, is that a court does not automatically assume severability, particularly when legislatures chose to implement such a provision in one part of the law but not another. Presumably the legislature knew how to insert a severability provision and for whatever reason chose to do so with respect to Medicaid Expansion but not with regards to the Individual Mandate.
But the court can look at legislative intent in deciding whether a provision is severable even though it is not specified in the law. Judge O’Connor conducts such an analysis, beginning at page 34 of his decision, and determined that the rest of the PPACA was not severable from the Individual mandate provision. His analysis goes on through page 55, examining SCOTUS’ prior decisions in *NFIB *and *King *as well as Congressional Intent. He concluded that severing the unconstitutional Individual Mandate from the rest of the PPACA would leave intact a scheme that was doomed to failure (as similar systems in individual states had resulted in rising premiums and shrinking insurance pools) and would not accomplish the act’s stated goals of lowering premiums and increasing availability of insurance. As such O’Connor concluded that the Individual Mandate was inseverable and thus the PPACA as an entirety must be ruled unconstitutional.
Yes, but my point is that severing a part of a law is something that a court does. In this case, it was Congress that effectively eliminated the tax by setting it to zero. This is a different situation from one in which, hypothetically, a court ruled the tax to be unconstitutional or otherwise invalid, in which case it would have no choice but to throw out the whole law. Judge O’Connor seems to be saying that Congress cannot amend the ACA in this way, because the remainder of the law is not severable. In other words, O’Connor imposed a standard meant for courts that interpret laws on the body that passes laws.