Late Friday afternoon, a federal judge in Fort Worth ruled that, because the individual mandate could no longer be upheld as a tax (because Congress in 2017 eliminated the monetary assessment for noncompliance), it was unconstitutional – and that it couldn’t be severed from the rest of the Affordable Care Act, so all of Obamacare is invalid. Fantastic, right? This is what I and many others have been working for since the law was signed in March 2010 and, while it took a while, we finally reached to the mountaintop – a second bite at the apple to undo John Roberts’s betrayal, right?
Well, not quite. Much as Judge Reed O’Connor’s ruling seemed to parallel the ruling by Judge Roger Vinson nearly eight years ago, in the litigation that culminated NFIB v. Sebelius in 2012 – Josh Blackman even evoked that early decision in a clever allusion to Groundhog Day – this time around there are different statutory facts being evaluated and so a different legal posture.
Mind you, it’s absolutely correct that a “shared responsibility payment” that is $0 can no longer be justified as a tax, even under Chief Justice Roberts’s twistification. That is, a bare command to buy insurance is unconstitutional because it goes beyond federal power under the Commerce Clause and Necessary and Proper Clause (so ruled a majority of the Supreme Court, including Roberts).
Read more at https://www.cato.org/blog/ruling-striking-down-obamacare-comes-six-years-late-dollar-short
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