The Court reasoned that the ACA was not a command to buy health insurance—which Congress would lack the power to enact—but merely a tax for not doing so. Two individuals and several states, including Texas, then challenged the individual mandate as unconstitutional, arguing that because it no longer carried a penalty, it no longer qualified as a tax.
They also argued that because the individual mandate is essential to the ACA, the entire statute must be struck down. The Fifth Circuit held that the plaintiffs possessed standing, held the individual mandate is unconstitutional, and directed the district court to consider an appropriate remedy on remand. Even if payments necessary to hold the insurance coverage required by the ACA were an injury, that injury is not traceable to the government, because without any penalty for noncompliance the statute is unenforceable.
The states do not have Article III standing either, because they have not shown their injuries are fairly traceable to unlawful government conduct. Please feel free to contact the following practice leaders:. Appellate and Constitutional Law Practice. Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. It may also be that some of the ACA is severable from the individual mandate, and some is not.
Health policy analysts expect the issue to go all the way to the Supreme Court, which upheld Obamacare in a narrowly divided ruling. The decision Wednesday decreases the chances of a Supreme Court decision before the elections. Texas and other Republican-led states brought the suit, which was defended by Democratic-led states and the House of Representatives. The New Orleans-based court heard arguments in July.
Texas argued that therefore the ACA must be scrapped. The challengers had argued that the whole ban on robocalls should be struck down, but instead the justices, in an opinion by Kavanaugh, severed the exception from the statute, leaving the rest of the law in place. Although the law banning robocalls contained a specific provision addressing severability, Kavanaugh also discussed the severability doctrine more generally.
The key question in deciding whether the mandate can be severed, they asserted, is what Congress intended. The House and California emphasized that there were several times when Congress considered legislation that would have repealed part or all of the ACA, but it declined to do so.
Instead, Congress reduced the penalty for failure to obtain health insurance to zero, leaving the rest of the ACA in place. In particular, they said, the guaranteed-issue and community-rating provisions of the ACA originally were not expected to exist or function without the mandate. Removing the mandate alone would upset the balance of costs and benefits that the rest of the major provisions seek to achieve.
The minor provisions would then also have to be invalidated, including because there is no reason to believe that Congress would have passed them without the rest of the ACA, the challengers argue. While declining to comment on her views about the current challenge, Barrett seemed to suggest that the heart of the case would be over whether the mandate could be severed from the rest of the ACA — a topic on which she has not written.
Former U. This post was originally published at Howe on the Court. Posted in Merits Cases , Symposium before oral argument in California v. Cases: California v. Texas , Texas v. Specifically, did Austin, Texas, violate the free-speech rights of advertising companies when it regulated "off-premises" business signs more strictly than "on-premises" signs?
AHoweBlogger explains:. In , the Supreme Court unanimously agreed that an Arizona town could not impose different restrictions on the One case challenges Congress' exclusion of Puerto Rico from a federal safety-net program.
The other involves the right of death-row prisoners to receive spiritual guidance in their final moments. Two cases today: a lawsuit against the FBI for surveilling Muslim Americans, and a technical copyright dispute. But some justices seemed reluctant to wade into broader questions about the right to carry guns in public. AHoweBlogger's full analysis:. The 5 th Circuit decided that the both the individual and state plaintiffs have standing to challenge the ACA in court.
Standing ensures that federal courts are deciding actual cases or controversies as required by the U. Standing is essential for the court to have jurisdiction to decide a case and therefore cannot be waived. To establish standing, a party must suffer an injury that is concrete and actual or imminent; fairly traceable to the challenged conduct; and likely to be redressed by a favorable court ruling.
The 5 th Circuit agreed with the trial court that the individual plaintiffs have standing because they have spent money that they otherwise would not have spent, absent the individual mandate, to purchase health insurance. The dissent reached the opposite conclusion, finding that neither the individual nor the state plaintiffs has standing to bring the case.
The 5 th Circuit sent the case back to the trial court for additional analysis about which ACA provisions should survive without the individual mandate. The trial court may consider whether the federal government timely raised this argument and whether Supreme Court precedent supports limiting the remedy in this way. Severability is a question of law, which the 5 th Circuit could have resolved without sending the case back to the trial court. The dissent agreed with the majority that the severability analysis should look to the intent of Congress when passing the TCJA in However, the dissent concluded that the fact that Congress changed the tax penalty amount to zero while leaving the rest of the ACA in place indicates that Congress intended for all of the other provisions to remain in effect.
The Supreme Court has agreed to review four legal questions in the case. First, the Court will consider whether Texas and the individual plaintiffs have standing to bring the lawsuit to challenge the individual mandate.
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