Federal judge in Texas strikes down Affordable Care Act
In a multitude of Tweets, Trump has howled with unbounded joy.
In his opinion, District Judge Reed O'Connor said the "Individual Mandate can no longer be fairly read as an exercise of Congress's Tax Power and is still impermissible under the Interstate Commerce Clause—meaning the Individual Mandate is unconstitutional."
He also held that the individual mandate is "essential to and inseverable from the remainder of the ACA."
The case against the ACA was brought by 20 Republican state attorneys general and governors, as well as two individuals.
It revolves around Congress effectively eliminating the individual mandate penalty by reducing it to $0 as part of the 2017 tax cut bill.
The mandate requires nearly all Americans to get health insurance or pay a penalty.
The Republican coalition, led by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, is arguing that the change rendered the mandate itself unconstitutional.
The states say that the voiding of the penalty, which takes effect next year, removes the legal underpinning the Supreme Court relied upon when it upheld the law in 2012 under Congress' tax power.
The Trump administration said in June that it would not defend several important provisions of Obamacare in court.
It agreed that zeroing out the penalty renders the individual mandate unconstitutional but argued that invalidates only the law's protections of those with pre-existing conditions.
These include banning insurers from denying people policies or charging them more based on their medical histories, as well as limiting coverage of the treatment they need.
But the administration maintained those parts of the law were severable and the rest of the Affordable Care Act could remain in place.
Professor Tim Jost, of Washington and Lee University, noted that O'Connor went further than the Trump administration had asked.
"The Trump administration only asked that the individual mandate and provisions protecting individuals with pre-existing conditions be invalidated, but O'Connor's order would invalidate many provisions of the Medicaid program, the Medicare program and other federal laws," he told CNN.
Many Democrats and some Republicans, apparently including WSJ's editorial page as of 12172018, say this will be overturned by Donald Trump's and the Republican US senate's even more than formerly conservative Supreme Court.
Really?
Is that what the Republicans and Trump should expect from their guys Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Alito, Roberts, and Thomas?
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