Nightly Nuance - June 23, 2021

Hello, my friends. Today, let’s talk about the Affordable Care Act and California et al. v. Texas et al.

The first time the Supreme Court considered the ACA’s individual mandate (the requirement that we all have to buy some minimum level of health insurance or pay a fine), it upheld that mandate’s constitutionality because it imposed a tax (the penalty for non-payment). In 2017, the GOP repealed the penalty as part of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act. So now we have a tax that doesn’t tax.

Thus, a group of states, led by Texas, took another shot at bringing the entire ACA down in Court. They argued:

The individual mandate is only constitutional because it’s a tax It’s not a tax anymore Therefore it’s unconstitutional And it’s so important to the whole ACA, that the whole ACA has to come down with it.

Justice Breyer, joined by CJ Roberts and Justices Thomas (begrudgingly), Sotomayor, Kagan, Kavanaugh, and Barrett, find that they don’t have to reach these questions because the states don’t have standing to sue. They say the states haven’t been harmed by the individual mandate since 2017 because...again, there’s no penalty for violating it anymore. Case dismissed.

We know that Justice Thomas has begrudgingly agreed because he wrote a concurring opinion to tell us so.

And Justice Alito continues his verbosity with a long dissent (joined by Justice Gorsuch) about how the Court is once again just bending over backwards to save and unsaveable law.

Looking forward to your questions and thoughts. -b

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