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Obamacare Wins Yet Another Supreme Court Challenge

The good news this morning is that the Supreme Court once again refused to kill off Obamacare:

The Supreme Court on Thursday dismissed the latest challenge to the Affordable Care Act, saying Republican-led states do not have the legal standing to try to upend the law. Justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote the court’s 7 to 2 decision that preserves the law that provides millions of Americans with health coverage.

Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Neil M Gorsuch dissented.

The bad news is that the case was decided on standing, not on its merits (or lack thereof) and even at that two justices dissented. Hell, even Clarence Thomas was willing to toss it out, but Alito and Gorsuch couldn't bring themselves to do it.

But at least it won. Surely no major law in American history has ever gone through the destruction test that Obamacare has, but with any luck this was its final trial. It's now the law of the land, permanently.

30 thoughts on “Obamacare Wins Yet Another Supreme Court Challenge

  1. skeptonomist

    It's good that we have not gone back to the pre-Obamacare state, but it would be very bad if the current Obamacare is actually permanent. It still has the Medicaid hole, and there is no chance that it can bring total costs down to what other advanced countries pay. So far Biden has done little but talk about a public option and there is no chance of real improvement until there are major changes in Congress.

    1. JonF311

      There's no way to actually bring costs down. The best we can hope for is something that restrains cost increases long term. Note that that is all that foreign healthcare systems ever did: they pit the brakes on healthcare inflation while the US did not, which is why we are now so much higher than the rest of the world.

  2. Jasper_in_Boston

    but Alito and Gorsuch couldn't bring themselves to do it.

    Is it just me or has Gorsuch turned out to be quite the extremist?

    1. Jasper_in_Boston

      Also, had three other justices joined them, a precedent would have been established whereby a Congress not willing to repeal a law can deliberately sabotage it just enough to render it unconstitutional (and let the court do its dirty work). Right? Or am I misinterpreting how this all went down?

      Simply mind-blowing it got this far.

    2. bbleh

      Ivory-tower, hothouse-raised Federalist wingnut, just like Alito.

      Rumor had it a while back that his attitude had alienated just about everybody else on the Court at the time. Dunno if that still holds.

    3. Special Newb

      He is but occasionally his extremism ends up benefiting the people. But its in his blood.

      Remember, his mom got axed from the Raegan admin for trying to fuck Jerry Brown's senate campaign by with holding EPA funds.

    4. JonF311

      Yes and no on Gorsuch. Don't forget he was the guy who wrote the majority decision which extended existing anti-discrimination statutes to LGBT people. The Religious Right types had a fit about that.

  3. bbleh

    ...with any luck this was its final trial.

    Hahahano.

    Most Republican politicians don't actually want Obamacare to fail, because that would mean that the burden of 30 million suddenly-uninsured people would fall mostly on their redder, poorer states. (And try as they would, it would be pretty tough to blame it on Biden; they've allied themselves too long and too publicly with attempts to overturn it.)

    But they want to appear to want it to fail, because their base -- both the well-off Poujadists and the poorer yahoos (the latter of whom benefit heavily from Obamacare but are too stupid to realize what they'd lose) -- hate hate hate the Black Guy's Welfare Program, and they want their politicians to behave like they hate it too.

    So no, the kabuki will not end with this. Or, probably, ever. Hell, Republicans are still campaigning against Social Security, and that's almost 100 years old.

    1. ScentOfViolets

      Wow. Your right. That the centennial anniversary of Social Security is less than 20 years away makes me feel old all of a sudden.

    2. DFPaul

      Agree. It's similar to their "anti-abortion" kabuki. They don't really want the issue to go away as a rabble rouser. (However, it looks like in the case of abortion, with a now 6-3 court achieved, they're going to have no choice other than to toss Roe next year. Here's hoping that creates a weekly Women's March in reaction, leading up to the midterms of 2022.)

      1. Vog46

        Don't need to toss it. Just change the fetal viability portion so that abortions are illegal after 6 to 8 weeks and voila you have eliminated abortion without ruling that Roe vs Wade is over turned

      2. JonF311

        Prediction: the abortion cases will also be decided on narrow grounds that leave Roe untouched and the Right to Lifers fuming. Roberts very much prefers decisions that avoid setting grand precedents and overturning past Court actions (and congressional legislation). He seems to have no problem getting enough other justices to join him.

    3. Special Newb

      I dunno, I thinking nixing the case on standing makes it harder for the crazy states to bring any more actions.

      1. bbleh

        It might make it tougher to win them but not to bring them. These were state AGs who can bring anything they feel is to their political advantage. And if they decide not to bring them in the name of a state, they’ll find some putatively plausible individual or organization. (Maybe a church! Ooo yeah!) And in any case, they don’t really want to win; they just want to say publicly how much they hate Obamacare.

        It’s like the 60-odd attempts by the Republicans to repeal it when they controlled the House. They don’t care about the outcome, only the theater.

        1. JonF311

          If the Court has stated that standing is lacking then it will be less likely other judges will handle the cases rather than rejecting them out of hand.

  4. Austin

    It's now the law of the land, permanently.

    Even in highly functional democracies, no law is ever "permanent" - a future legislature can always rewrite or repeal it. And in our "democracy"? The law will last as long as the coalition of representatives and senators unwilling to repeal it continue to stay in power, as well as the makeup of SCOTUS doesn't slide further to the far right... which is to say, permanence cannot be assumed.

        1. NealB

          Let's do that, @KenSchulz, shall we? Let's take a bet we can flip even just 2 or 3 Senate seats, but shoot the moon at 17 pickups in the House. Piece of cake? Damn tootin'. Let's bag this thing.

  5. realrobmac

    I've never understood the argument that a change to an existing law renders the existing law unconstitutional. I know. No one took it seriously except for 18 states attorneys general and various lower courts and 2 supreme court justices. But why wouldn't the change setting the mandate to $0 have been unconstitutional rather than the entire law? Like how certain aspects of the Medicaid expansion were deemed unconstitutional. They were not deemed to have made all of Medicaid unconstitutional.

    1. JonF311

      Yeah, the argument was nuts to start with. How many other major laws have been fiddled with by later Congresses? They were opening a real can of worms with that tactic and it's no surprise even some conservative justices said No Way.

  6. NealB

    It is the law of the land; and it's the least we could do. On to including dental, eye glasses, and hearing aids.

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