The Supreme Court shut down an attack on Obamacare in the most dismissive way possible.
For the third time since the Affordable Care Act became law in 2010, the Supreme Court rejected a call for it to sabotage that law — this time, in an unusually dismissive opinion. The Court’s brief decision in California v. Texas, issued Thursday, ultimately concludes that the plaintiffs trying to undo the law had no business being in court in the first place. The case was brought by a bloc of Republican state officials, as well as two individuals who object to Obamacare. Their case centered on the law’s individual mandate: As originally drafted, the Affordable Care Act required most Americans to either obtain health insurance or pay higher taxes, and the Supreme Court famously upheld this so-called “individual mandate” in NFIB v. Sebelius (2012) as a valid exercise of Congress’s power to levy taxes. In 2017, however, Congress amended Obamacare to zero out this tax. So, under current law, most Americans must either obtain health insurance or pay zero dollars. The Texas plaintiffs didn’t just claim that this zeroed-out tax is unconstitutional (on the theory that a zero dollar tax can’t be an exercise of Congress’s taxing power), they claimed that the entire law must be declared invalid if the zero dollar tax is stuck down.
