I think there unfortunately is precedent for a law without a severability clause being allowed to stand even after a portion of it was overturned. However, I don’t know the details, and possibly it was an entirely different situation.
This whole law is probably riddled with technical flaws, since it was inserted in the shell of a perfectly innocuous, short bill sent up by Congress (requesting something like an extension of some VA or military benefit, IIRC). The earlier language of the bill, except for the preamble, was simply removed and the Dems stuffed 2000 incoherent pages of garbage into it and passed it. On Christmas Eve. Hard to believe that’s legal, but it is.
This is out there, I know, but maybe Democrats will apply pressure for a finding for the appellants, then use the severability clause as an excuse to kill the law that is killing their party. They could go back to using the lack of socialized medicine as a campaign issue.
I think if you read the opinion correctly, it was never ruled constitutional.
Part of it WAS in fact ruled unconstitutional, the part about the Medicaid funding.
The individual mandate part, well, the opinion basically says “Congress CAN do this if they call it a tax...”
But no where did the court acknowledge or deem that Congress HAD done it under their power to tax.
The first person who gets charged with a penalty is on the fast-track to take it back to SCOTUS!
And at that point, it WOULD be ruled unconstitutional - there’s no way around it.
This seems like a tough case to win. Is there legal precedent for a business getting to opt out of government regulations because the regulations are against the owners’ religion?
The courts might be afraid to open the door to anyone making up a new religion as a means to escape any government regulation they want.
We already saw adoption centers shut down because they couldn’t escape the mandate to let homosexual couples adopt.
Nothing specifically gives the Supreme Court the right to strike down a law as unconstitutional. Really all that can happen is that the Supreme Court strikes down a particular prosecution and effectively say that it will do likewise with any other prosecutions under the statute. Nothing would particularly prevent prosecutors from ignoring the Supreme Court, or saying that for whatever reason the particular cases they're bringing are in some way different from the prosecutions the Court invalidated.