Is the Supreme Court Finally Done Saving Obamacare?
Most analysts didnt expect the lawsuit to gain traction given the flimsy nature of its arguments. Then it was assigned to Judge Reed OConnor, a George W. Bush appointee to the federal district court in northern Texas. OConnor is the favored venue for lawsuits by conservative legal activists because he tends to give them what they want in sweeping rulings and in December 2018, he did exactly what Texas and other GOP-led states hoped hed do: OConnor ruled that the individual mandate was now unconstitutional. When courts rule against certain provisions in larger pieces of legislation, they often sever the offending portion and let the rest of the law stand. OConnor instead opted to strike down the entire law. His bombshell ruling drew immediate criticism from legal scholars across the ideological spectrum. We were on opposing sides of the 2012 and 2015 Supreme Court challenges to the Affordable Care Act, and we have different views of the merits of the act itself, wrote Jonathan Adler and Abbe Gluck, two law professors who played a major role in past ACA-related cases, in a joint New York Times op-ed in 2018. But as experts in the field of statutory law, we agree that this decision makes a mockery of the rule of law and basic principles of democracyespecially Congresss constitutional power to amend its own statutes and do so in accord with its own internal rules.  While on appeal, California and a coalition of Democratic-led states intervened on the ACAs behalf, filling a void left by the Trump administrations half-hearted defense of the law. The Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld OConnors ruling in 2019 but ordered him to reconsider whether the entire ACA had to be struck down. The Democratic-led states, in turn, asked the Supreme Court to review the entire matter and uphold the ACAs constitutionality. The justices agreed to take up the case and set oral arguments for November 10, 2020, one week after the presidential election. California attacked Texass case on two grounds. First, it argued that the states and their residents didnt have standing to challenge the mandates constitutionality. Federal courts are barred from issuing advisory opinions; they can only hear a dispute if theres an injury to remedy and a remedy to give. In this case, since the mandates penalty was set at zero, California argued there was no injury for the courts to fix because nothing would happen. Second, the state argued that the rest of the ACA should pass constitutional muster without the mandate even if it is struck down.