Obamacare has once again been rescued by a Supreme Court that seems determined to keep it alive regardless of the Constitution or precedent. Thursday morning, the justices dismissed California v. Texas based on the dubious proposition that a coalition of 18 GOP states had no legal standing to challenge the “reform” law or its infamous insurance mandate. The majority didn’t deign to consider the merits of the lawsuit, which argued that the mandate was not merely unconstitutional but inseverable from the rest of the statute. The Court’s cowardice drew a blistering dissent from Justice Samuel Alito, who accused the majority of ignoring decades of precedent in order to deny the states standing: No one can fail to be impressed by the lengths to which this Court has been willing to go to defend the ACA against all threats. A penalty is a tax. The United States is a State. And 18 States who bear costly burdens under the ACA cannot even get a foot in the door to raise a constitutional challenge. Fans of judicial inventiveness will applaud once again. But I must respectfully dissent.
Two lower courts had already ruled in favor of Texas, et al. U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor ruled in late 2018 that the insurance mandate was unconstitutional and inseverable from the rest of the statute. The Trump administration declined to defend the statute, whereupon a group of Democratic states led by California appealed the ruling to the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld O’Connor’s ruling on the mandate but remanded...........
