Thursday, June 17, 2021

They'll never quit trying


Dissenters were Alito and Gorsuch.  
The decision threw out the challenge to the law, on grounds that Texas and other objecting GOP-dominated states were not required to pay anything under the mandate provision and thus had no standing to bring the challenge to court.

The mandate, the most controversial provision of the law, required that people either buy health insurance or pay a penalty. In 2012, it was upheld by a 5-to-4 vote, with Chief Justice John Roberts casting the decisive fifth vote, on the grounds that penalty fell within the taxing power of Congress.

In 2017, however, Congress got rid of the penalty after the Congressional Budget Office concluded that the law would continue to function effectively even without it. That prompted the challengers to go back to court, contending that because the penalty had been zeroed out, it was no longer a tax or a mandate. What's more, they contended, because the mandate was so interwoven with the rest of the ACA, the whole law must be struck down in its entirety.

  NPR

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