Posted on 12/15/2018 4:53:09 AM PST by Carriage Hill
In a ruling sure to be appealed to Supreme Court, Texas court says the ACA, also known as Obamacare, can no longer stand without the penalty against the uninsured.
A federal judge in Texas struck down the Affordable Care Act on Friday night, ruling that former President Barack Obama's signature domestic legislation has fallen down like a losing game of "Jenga."
But the White House said that with the ruling expected to be appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, the law will remain in place for now.
(Excerpt) Read more at nbcnews.com ...
WHO is appealing it ?
Is Trump DOJ appealing it ?
Isn’t Trump over the DOJ ?
Why would Trump allow this ?
I depends on how much spine Roberts and Kavanaugh have.
I think Thomas, Gorsuch, and Alito are solid.
Maybe President Trump will have cloned some spine for Roberts.
Kavanaugh showed some spine in the confirmation hearings.
Well, The Obama administration and the Pelosi progressives said that the mandate to buy health insurance WAS NOT A TAX.
Justice Roberts and the Supremes said that the mandate WAS A TAX and that the taxing authority permitted the congress to impose the mandate.
When President Trump was elected the congress passed a budget which included a provision to stop the IRS from enforcing the mandate (TAX) or collecting information on insurance coverage. The taxing authority was revoked.
Nancy told us we have to pass it to find out what’s in it.
One thing that was not in it was a severability clause which preserves portions of the law if any other portion is struck down. Hence we find ourselves with a non-tax/tax that is unenforceable. Clear as mud.
If my memory serves me, the tax was the pivot point for being constitutional or not during the first time it was reviewed by SCOTUS.
The government cannot force you to buy ANYTHING.
Do we trust Kavanaugh, or is he another Roberts? That would be another low-integrity traitor with something to hide.
Technically it can’t. The entire SCOTUS reasoning in ruling ACA constitutional was categorizing the purchase mandate as a tax which the Constitution allows Congress to do.
There is NO severability clause written in the ACA law (which there probably couldn’t have been and pass SCOTUS muster) for the mandate and the law as a whole so without one the other is not tenable.
It is possible for SCOTUS to use some warped twisted reasoning to uphold ACA but it would need to be tortured beyond comprehension so it is hence unlikely they could without looking ridiculous.
Trump wants Mitch and Nancy to pass a new great healthcare bill that protects existing conditions! What a buffoon.
I was wondering the same thing. Who has standing to appeal?
The other states. If 19 states had the standing to file the suit then the other states have standing to appeal.
They looked ridiculous last time. They didnt care. Its for the children you know. Obamacare isnt going anywhere. Its the herpes of laws.
To a degree, but there original decision was at least technically defensible.
Upholding it now would not be.
I do not think we know exactly the circumstances yet.
First it has to be appealed to the Fith Circuit. Who has standing to appeal is not clear. But lots of leftist activist groups will claim standing. Notice the DOJ did not attempt to defend this case.
From ksla.com: The Supreme Court upheld that part of the law in 2012, ruling it fell in line with Congress’ power to levy taxes.
Congress, however, eliminated the tax penalty last December as part of President Trump’s major tax overhaul.
A group of 20 states led by Texas sued to invalidate the law, arguing that, therefore, the mandate without a tax penalty attached was unconstitutional, and so too the rest of the law. The Justice Department had also announced in June it would not defend the ACA in the case, endorsing that argument.
“Once the heart of the ACA - the individual mandate - is declared unconstitutional, the remainder of the ACA must also fall,” the suit said.
Judge O’Connor, a George W. Bush appointee, agreed.
“The court … declares the Individual Mandate UNCONSTITUTIONAL,” his judgment concluded. “Further, the Court declares the remaining provisions of the ACA are INSEVERABLE and therefore INVALID.”Who will appeal? Not sure. Someone will.
Wow ,.
Trump should dismantle immediately .
They jumped and obeyed every Left Wing Foreign invader judges ruling .
Before ObamaCare you could choose what level of coverage you needed. I paid under $100 a month for our adult son’s policy. It was Catastrophic Care Only. He is young, healthy, rarely ill. After ObamaCare the cheapest policy we could get for him cost $244 a month. At the time he only made about $10K a year and couldn’t afford that.
The things that drove up the cost of Health Insurance were all caused by Obama. You HAD to pay for things you didn’t need if you were a young healthy adult, especially if you were a male.... He only wanted bare minimum coverage, not birth control pills or pediatric care... his policy was for a single man, not a family or wife... He doesn’t need 99% of the things listed here. Doesn’t smoke or drink or use drugs, isn’t perfect, but the only health problems he has had in many years came after his 2 mission trips to Haiti. A skin infection he got there (the place is filthy, he takes his own food when he goes there. Clintons took in MILLIONS for Haiti, but kept 96% of the donations)
This is from gov. website.
https://www.healthcare.gov/coverage/what-marketplace-plans-cover/
Every health plan must cover the following services:
Ambulatory patient services (outpatient care you get without being admitted to a hospital)
Emergency services
Hospitalization (like surgery and overnight stays)
Pregnancy, maternity, and newborn care (both before and after birth)
Mental health and substance use disorder services, including behavioral health treatment (this includes counseling and psychotherapy)
Prescription drugs
Rehabilitative and habilitative services and devices (services and devices to help people with injuries, disabilities, or chronic conditions gain or recover mental and physical skills)
Laboratory services
Preventive and wellness services and chronic disease management
Pediatric services, including oral and vision care (but adult dental and vision coverage aren’t essential health benefits)
Additional benefits
Plans must also include the following benefits:
Birth control coverage
Breastfeeding coverage
I’mnot a lawyer and seldom play one on you tube but.....
Roberts ruling that Obamacare was a tax hinged on the fact those not signing up had to pay. That was ruled out, gone, not applicable.
With the mandate gone, the rest is unconstitutional as judged by those in the original court minority ruling.
Though President Trump’s pick of Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court has been broadly praised among the conservative legal establishment, it has produced its share of grumbles among other conservatives. Part of the division is based more on intangible cultural factors. Though nobody would question his credentials, there’s fear among a subset of conservatives that as a Washington insider and former Bush administration lawyer, Kavanaugh could turn out to be overly cautious and fearful about upsetting elites, thus upholding unconstitutional laws and sustaining bad precedents.
Though Kavanaugh’s hundreds of decisions in a dozen years as an appellate judge have been broadly conservative ( particularly when it comes to reining in the regulatory state), there is one decision in particular that has divided conservatives — his dissenting opinion in an Obamacare case brought to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in 2011. This has triggered a debate over whether Kavanaugh could be another Chief Justice John Roberts, who the Right still does not forgive for upholding Obamacare.
In the Seven-Sky v. Holder case, a forerunner to the landmark Supreme Court ruling, a three judge panel decided 2-1 that Obamacare’s individual mandate was constitutional. While Kavanaugh dissented from the main opinion, he did not go as far as declaring Obamacare unconstitutional. Instead, he argued that the court was not yet in a position to hear the case, because under an arcane 19th-century law known as the Tax Anti-Injunction Act, courts could not hear challenges to a tax that had not been collected yet, and thus any decision would have to wait until 2015, when taxpayers had to file mandate penalties for the first time. In summary, Kavanaugh didn’t uphold Obamacare, but he did not take the opportunity to strike it down, either.
Where things get more complicated is that as part of his legal analysis, he alluded to the fact that with a small tweak of language, the law could be seen as a constitutional exercise of Congress’s taxing power. As Josh Blackman, who chronicled the case in his book “Unprecedented” notes, Obama Solicitor General Donald Verrilli cited this Kavanaugh point in his brief to the U.S. Supreme Court. This forms the basis of critic Chris Jacobs’ assertion that Kavanaugh’s opinion provided the roadmap for Roberts to uphold Obamacare as a tax.
On the other hand, Kavanaugh’s suggested change to Obamacare could also be seen as an acknowledgment that it was not constitutional as written. Furthermore, elsewhere in his opinion, Kavanaugh also expressed skepticism that the Commerce Clause allowed for the mandate. “To uphold the Affordable Care Act’s mandatory-purchase requirement under the Commerce Clause, we would have to uphold a law that is unprecedented on the federal level in American history,” Kavanaugh wrote. “That fact alone counsels the Judiciary to exercise great caution.” Kavanaugh went on to call the implications of punishing those without health insurance “jarring.” Law professor Justin Walker, who clerked for Kavanaugh as well as Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy during the time the Obamacare case was decided, has argued that Kavanaugh’s critical Commerce Clause analysis was more influential at the Supreme Court level than his tax analysis. “I can tell you with certainty that the only justices following a roadmap from Brett Kavanaugh were the ones who said Obamacare was unconstitutional,” he wrote.
The argument over Kavanaugh’s Obamacare opinion is likely to play a central role in the debate over his jurisprudence in the months ahead, particularly as another case challenging the law makes its way through the courts. But it’s worth cautioning that how Kavanaugh ruled at the appellate court level may not be an indication of how he would have ruled were he on the Supreme Court in 2012. To start, there was already a clear majority of justices who ruled that the Anti-Injunction Act did not bar them from deciding the case. So either way, the Court was going to get to the merits. That could have forced a hypothetical Justice Kavanaugh to make a different decision, and given his skepticism about the Commerce Clause argument and his hint that a tweak to Obamacare would be needed to make it a constitutional exercise of taxing power, it’s quite possible he would have been a vote to overturn the law.
“The government cannot force you to buy ANYTHING.”
A tax filer could include partially completed (name and address only) ACA/IRS forms with his or her 1040 and just mark it as “TBD (N/A)” or some such indication that there will be no acknowledgement of any amount due as a penalty for not having purchased health insurance whether through healthcare.gov or not. I believe there are taxpayers out there who know this and then there are the taxpayers who just go along to get along when maybe they never had to in the first place.
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