High court mulls frivolous lawsuit
Amajority of U. S. Supreme Court justices appeared ready during arguments this week to reject the latest and silliest legal assault on the Affordable Care Act, edging away from the brink of plunging the nation’s health care system into chaos and themselves into farce. If the forces of reason do indeed prevail in the case, California vs. Texas, Americans should feel relief at the outcome but dismay that such a deeply frivolous claim came to be considered by the nation’s highest court.
Brought by Republican attorneys general and backed by the Trump administration, the case relies on tortured reasoning and previous failed attacks on the decadeold ACA, which has survived scores of congressional repeal attempts and two earlier Supreme Court cases. And yet President Trump’s Justice Department has forced California Attorney General Xavier Becerra to lead the defense of a federal law that has extended health coverage to more than 20 million Americans.
In 2012, considering arguments that the law’s requirement that all Americans obtain health insurance is unconstitutional, the high court ruled that while Congress could not impose such a mandate, it could levy a tax penalty on the uninsured. In 2017, a Republicancontrolled Congress, having repeatedly failed to follow through on threats to undo the increasingly popular law, reduced that penalty to zero as part of a taxcut package. The plaintiffs claim that made the provision an unconstitutional mandate once again, requiring the court to strike down not only the inoperative requirement but the entirety of the 900page health care overhaul.
That would require the court to make a series of logical and legal leaps. To grant that the Republicanled states have standing to sue, the justices would have to find that someone is harmed by an unenforceable health insurance mandate backed by a nonexistent tax penalty. Then they would have to agree that Congress’ tax cut revived the unconstitutional mandate even as it rendered it moot. And finally, they would have to rule that the mandate cannot be legally severed from the rest of the ACA — from expanding Medicaid to protecting those with preexisting conditions to posting calorie counts — which must therefore must be struck down.
It’s no wonder that even legal scholars opposed to the ACA have described the case as “a mockery of the rule of law”; in particular, the argument against the mandate’s severability “has been rejected by most experts across the political spectrum.” Justice Brett Kavanaugh recognized as much during the arguments, suggesting he would join Chief Justice John Roberts and the court’s liberals in a skeptical majority.
It’s a frightening measure of the judiciary’s creeping extremism, however, that a Texas judge adopted the plaintiffs’ argument in full, ruling the ACA unconstitutional, and that an appeals court failed to overturn the decision despite acknowledging its widely noted deficiencies.
More auspiciously, Presidentelect Joe Biden this week reiterated his intent to strengthen the ACA, ending the government’s assault on the law it’s supposed to enforce and the people it’s meant to serve.