Even before the death of Justice Ginsburg the Supreme Court had scheduled a pair of related cases about Obamacare. Oral arguments are scheduled for November 10, 2020.
In Texas v California and another case California v Texas the PPACA faces another challenge. Chief Justice Roberts has sided with the liberal wing of the court in several rulings which upheld the act against various challenges. But this time the court will likely only have 8 members. The law may be in serious jeopardy.
The ruling on appeal from the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals court a lower court ruling that the individual mandate in the PPACA is unconstitutional. The lower court had ruled that the individual mandate could not be severed from the rest of the law and thus the entire PPACA was unconstitutional. The Appeals Court did not opine on the severability issue, returning the case to the lower court for further proceedings.
The case has 18 states challenging the PPACA. If SCOTUS deadlocks 4-4 then the lower court ruling stands, but does not become nationwide precedent. This could mean that the individual mandate is deemed unconstitutional in the 18 states challenging the law. Whether the whole law falls may depend of the ruling of the district court in its further proceedings - with the same judge who previously ruled the whole law must fall.
The 18 states in question are: Utah, Arizona, North Dakota, South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Texas, Missouri, Arkansas, Louisiana, Indiana, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, and West Virginia.
Even if Biden wins and successfully seats a new justice it may not matter. Newly seated justices do not have a vote in cases for which oral arguments were heard before their appointment.
If Biden wins and Dems control both houses of Congress, then perhaps they can pass an all-new Bidencare bill, written to get around the courts’ objections.
The FIRST order of business to make this (and many other acts) possible will be to eliminate the filibuster.
If that happens, it means Democrats likely control both houses of Congress, which means the case could be moot in every way that matters by the time the court rules. All it takes to remove the meaningful portion of the case from the courts is a severability clause. The courts would then be left with a case purely about the constitutionality of the toothless mandate, which would be of no interest to anybody.
Missed the edit window: I don’t understand why there hasn’t been any attempt to add a severability clause to the mandate via a must-pass appropriations bill. Dare the Senate, which I believe has several Republican members who claim to think this case is totally asinine, to strip it back out.
This may be a distinction without a difference, but if it’s still Roberts + the 3 liberal justices on one side and the 4 other conservatives on the other side, I think it’s more likely they don’t take the case up at all. Roberts seems to care a lot about keeping the SC from being used as a political arm and it seems in character for him that he would figure out that the court doesn’t have the votes to protect the law and would rather get other justices to agree to not take it up so that they can superficially stay out of things.
I also think that this case is much more flimsy than the previous challenge. Previously, you had the medicaid expansion, which as written was blatantly unconstitutional, and the “is it a mandate or a tax” at least was worthy of some thought. This case just fails logically. The claim is that the legislature intended the mandate to be inseparable from the bill even though the legislature itself made it nonexistent. This doesn’t mean I don’t think 4 conservative justices won’t end up defending the law, but it’s more likely that one of the 4 reliably conservative members will have a different view this time around.
SCOTUS has already granted cert and thus taken the case.
The justices could push for a rehearing of oral arguments once a new justice is seated. They could rule that some or all of the parties don’t have standing and thus reject the appeal without having to vote on it. The court could DIG the case. The court could remand to the Appeals Court without reaching a vote on the case. All sorts of things could happen. Might happen.
But as things stand it is not looking good. Hearing was set for after the election it is speculated in order to not be a political influence.
The ACA is dead. So are a lot of Republican voters. It will be up to states to reinstitute something like it. Maybe, for example, there could be a multistate compact to extend Romneycare to all states that are interested.
Great, the blue states can do the usual – pay our share of taxes to take care of our own, and also bail out the red states who can’t be bothered to care for their own poor people.
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a Republican who led the challenge, vowed to continue to fight Obamacare. The individual mandate, Paxton wrote on Twitter, “was unconstitutional when it was enacted and it is still unconstitutional.”
No, you twit, the SCOTUS just said the opposite. Typical Republican thinking: I want it to be true, therefore it must be true, despite all evidence to the contrary.
No, SCOTUS didn’t say a damn thing about constitutionality of the individual mandate. They punted with “you don’t have standing”. Still. a 7-2 decision that upholds ACA was better than I could hoped for.