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The Affordable Care Act appears likely to withstand its third challenge to the Supreme Court.
During oral arguments in a case to eliminate Obamacare, several court conservatives on Tuesday expressed their refusal to overturn the landmark legislation.
Chief Justice John Roberts, who voted in 2012 to uphold Obamacare, and Judge Brett Kavanaugh, appointed by President Donald Trump, have suggested that the court could reject a contested provision of the law, known as the individual warrant. , while leaving the rest standing.
The individual retainer provision, passed in 2010, requires most Americans to purchase health insurance or pay a penalty. GOP-controlled Congress reduced the penalty to $ 0 in 2017.
The Supreme Court upheld the mandate in 2012 under the taxing power of Congress, but Texas and other Republican-led states argued that the reduced sentence made that justification inapplicable and, therefore, any the Affordable Care Act was to be struck down.
The Trump administration, through the Department of Justice, has advocated for the challenge of the Red States.
The court’s six Tories appeared to support arguments made by Kyle Hawkins, the Texas Solicitor General, and Acting Department of Justice Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall, that the individual warrant became unconstitutional when stripped of the pain that accompanies it.
But Roberts and Kavanaugh suggested it wouldn’t doom the rest of the law.
“I think it’s hard for you to argue that Congress intended to bring down the entire law if the mandate was canceled,” Roberts told Hawkins. Roberts was appointed by President George W. Bush.
Roberts acknowledged that some Republican lawmakers might have wanted the Supreme Court to strike down the law, “but that’s not our job.”
Kavanaugh told Donald Verrilli, who was Solicitor General under former President Barack Obama, that “I tend to agree with you that this is a very simple matter” and that by virtue of the precedents of the Court “we would remove the warrant and leave the rest of the law in place.”
Kavanaugh later told Hawkins that he “seems sure” that Congress in 2017 wanted to lower the individual term sentence without getting rid of other provisions of the Affordable Care Act, such as its protections for people with disabilities. pre-existing conditions.
The three court liberals, Justices Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan are expected to side with California and a coalition of other states led by Democrats who defend Obamacare. It takes five votes to obtain a majority on the panel of nine judges.
The Democratic candidates appeared skeptical of the Red States’ argument that the mandate was unconstitutional, and sympathetic to California’s contention that these states did not even have the capacity to prosecute, given their inability to prove that ‘they had been wronged by the law.
“The only thing that has changed is something that has made the law less coercive,” Kagan said.
Breyer suggested that allowing the Red States to present their claim could raise challenges to all kinds of laws that would be illegal if they included penalties, such as hypothetical laws calling on citizens to plant trees, clean up trees. yards or to buy war bonds.
Health activists have warned that if the Supreme Court overturns the affordable care law, more than 20 million people could lose their insurance. The dispute, which was debated in the shadow of last week’s presidential election, was at the center of Democrats’ concerns during Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation hearings last month. Barrett’s questioning on Tuesday failed to shed light on his thinking about the ACA.
Two lower courts sided with Texas, including the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, that the individual warrant was illegal. The appeals court did not say whether the rest of the affordable care law should also be struck down.
The arguments, which were scheduled to last 80 minutes, began at 10 a.m. ET and ended around noon. They were conducted by telephone in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic and broadcast live to the public.
The case has become a political flashpoint in the race between Trump and President-elect Joe Biden, who have sketched very different visions for the future of American health care. Trump pushed to dump the affordable care law, while Biden’s agenda calls for building on the law, which the former vice president played a role in driving Congress in the first place.
The political stakes have been magnified by the pandemic, which has killed more than 230,000 people in the United States and made health care a bigger problem.
Efforts to contain the pandemic also triggered a devastating recession, which caused millions of people to lose health care coverage. Following the death of the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a Liberal, in September, Democrats sought to turn the fight for her replacement, Barrett, into a referendum on the law.
A decision is expected towards the end of June.
The case is known as California v. Texas, No. 19-840.
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