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“The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected another effort to dismantle the Affordable Care Act… The justices did not reach the main issue in the case: whether the entirety of the ACA was rendered unconstitutional when Congress eliminated the penalty for failing to obtain health insurance. Instead, by a vote of 7-2, the justices ruled that neither the states nor the individuals challenging the law have a legal right to sue, known as standing.” SCOTUSblog
“The Supreme Court [also] ruled Thursday [in Fulton v. City of Philadelphia] that Philadelphia violated the First Amendment’s free exercise clause when the city stopped working with a Catholic organization that refused to certify same-sex couples as potential foster parents… The problem, [Justice] Roberts made clear, is the existence of a ‘formal mechanism for granting exceptions’ in the first place, because such a scheme ‘‘invite[s]’ the government to decide which reasons for not complying with the policy are worthy of solicitude.’...
“The city, Roberts wrote, has not shown that its goals of maximizing the number of foster families and minimizing the city’s legal liability will be jeopardized by giving CSS an exemption from the non-discrimination policy. To the contrary, Roberts suggested, ‘including CSS in the program seems likely to increase, not reduce, the number of available foster parents.’ Roberts acknowledged the city’s ‘weighty’ interest in the ‘equal treatment of prospective foster parents and children,’ but he concluded that it was not sufficient to ‘justify denying CSS an exception for its religious exercise,’ especially when the city has a system of exemptions.” SCOTUSblog
Here’s our prior coverage of the ACA lawsuit and Fulton. The Flip Side
Both sides are critical of the lawsuit challenging the Affordable Care Act:
“It was an audacious ask of the Supreme Court — requesting the justices strike down the entire law despite only claiming that a single provision of Obamacare is unconstitutional. Especially since the provision that the plaintiffs challenged literally does nothing at all… Yet that didn’t stop 18 Republican state attorneys general from bringing this futile effort to kill Obamacare. In the end, they lost because of a simple fact: No one is injured by a law that requires them to pay zero dollars. As Breyer writes, ‘the IRS can no longer seek a penalty from those who fail to comply’ with the requirement to buy insurance. Thus, ‘there is no possible Government action that is causally connected to the plaintiffs’ injury.’”
Ian Millhiser, Vox
“This lawsuit was never likely to bring down the whole statute, and to that extent, the outcome today was the right one. Fevered Democratic predictions that Amy Coney Barrett would be the fifth vote to tear down the whole statute were proven to be the fantastical nonsense we always knew they were…
“Nobody comes out of this case looking particularly good. The Republican effort, embraced by the Trump Justice Department, to use a too-clever-by-half theory to do what a Republican Congress couldn’t, lost resoundingly. The Democrats’ trumpeted claims that the Court was about to toss the statute were revealed as false propaganda…
“The Obama-era arguments about the essential need for the individual mandate were revealed as a dispensable pretense… But the Court may finally have put an end to a decade of Obamacare cases in which it has contorted law and reason to save the statute, and only bought itself more political pressure and less respect.”
Dan McLaughlin, National Review
Other opinions below.
“[Justice] Thomas’ concurring argument laments that ‘this Court has gone to great lengths to rescue the [Affordable Care] Act from its own text.’ He also takes a swipe at the defendants, noting that they first represented the individual mandate penalty as a ‘linchpin’ of ObamaCare, and now claim it was ‘a throwaway sentence.’ Even with all that, Thomas writes, this new challenge is especially weak sauce…
“[This] should bring the legal challenges to the Affordable Care Act to an end. Even the most conservative jurist on the Supreme Court isn’t inclined to indulge judicial activism to kill it. If Republicans want to get rid of the ACA, they’ll have to do so in Congress — and they’ll need to come up with a better alternative first. How’s that coming along, by the way?”
Ed Morrissey, Hot Air
Regarding Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, “Unanimity is achieved at the Supreme Court for really only two reasons: The case is easy, or they want to send a message in controversial ones. Here, they are clearly sending a message that will allow us to, hopefully, finally put to rest the slanderous charge that, as Philadelphia put it, [LGBTQ rights] laws ‘protect its people from discrimination that occurs under the guise of religious freedom’ (emphasis added)…
“Religious groups that run adoption and foster-care agencies, hospitals, food banks, houses of worship, schools, day-care centers, and universities are not cynically and fraudulently ‘using religion’ when they serve the poor or the needy. They are exercising religion in all sincerity…
“By its actions the Court is saying people with sincere faith-informed understandings of social issues that cut against the grain of secularist thought aren’t to be treated as bigots, and government needs to back off… here is the most important line of the case: ‘The question . . . is not whether the City has a compelling interest in enforcing its non-discrimination policies generally, but whether it has such an interest in denying an exception to CSS.’ To which the Court answered with one voice, no.”
Roger Severino, Bench Memos
“The good news is that no Justice took Philadelphia’s side. But it’s hard not to read the Court’s narrow opinion, written by Chief Justice John Roberts, as another example of his mode of seeking consensus by watering down principle. He wants to win over liberal Justices and he is reluctant to take the heat from overturning even dubious precedents. But the cost is less protection for religious belief that is increasingly under siege by the state…
“The Little Sisters of the Poor, who object to ObamaCare’s contraception rule, have been to the Supreme Court twice, and President Biden has pledged to keep harassing the nuns. Unlike the liberals of 30 or even 10 years ago, today’s secular progressives are openly hostile to religious liberty, which needs a Supreme Court willing to defend it.”
Editorial Board, Wall Street Journal
“Today’s pair of rulings should confound the partisans on both sides who claim that the opposition justices vote in ideological lockstep. Today, we saw the conservative wing of the Court, including two of the three justices appointed by Donald Trump, vote to preserve Obamacare while the liberal wing voted en masse to uphold religious liberty over a law protecting same-sex couples.”
David Thornton, Racket News
“The fact is, that no matter how controversial the origins of a landmark social program, the longer it survives the harder it becomes to overturn… During the first 15 years of the program, Social Security (also known as old-age assistance) repeatedly came under attack. Congressional conservatives, for example, froze Social Security taxes in the early 1940s as a way to undermine the fiscal health of the policy. But the efforts ultimately didn't work…
“Over the years, more workers were brought into the program and a greater number of legislators in both parties came to see the virtues of a social safety net for elderly Americans. Older Americans also organized to defend the benefit. By the time President Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, was in office -- from 1953 to 1961 -- he understood that Social Security wasn't going away… With each passing year, [the ACA] will only become stronger and [more] cemented.”
Julian Zelizer, CNN
“So many of the horrors that many Republicans predicted the law would produce have not come to pass. Some 23 million people rely on the law for health coverage. The law has filled an important gap during the covid-19 pandemic: One million people signed up for coverage in a special enrollment period President Biden opened earlier this year. The ACA drastically slashed the uninsured rate in the United States, a trend that began to reverse when President Donald Trump did what he could to pick apart the law by executive order…
“Rather than continuing their crusade to undermine a successful policy, a decade-long effort in which many Republican leaders have denied health-care coverage to as many vulnerable people as they could, it is past time for Republicans to help make it work better. About 2 million low-income people could get coverage immediately if states such as Georgia, Florida and Texas would expand their Medicaid programs as the law envisioned. When put to a popular vote, Medicaid expansion has passed even in the deepest-red of states… A willingness to accept the ACA as settled law would set the stage for Congress to make improvements.”
Editorial Board, Washington Post
Regarding Fulton v. City of Philadelphia, “At the oral argument… Breyer and Kagan asked whether Philadelphia could refuse to contract with a social services agency that refused to place children with interracial couples because of its religious beliefs. The lawyer for Catholic Social Services immediately said the city could refuse to contract because that involved race discrimination, whereas this case concerns sexual orientation discrimination. But there is no basis for this distinction: There is a compelling government interest in stopping both forms of discrimination.”
Erwin Chemerinsky, Los Angeles Times
Yet “This ruling could have been worse… This is neither the first nor the last time the court will have to address the tension between anti-discrimination provisions and religious freedom, which is guaranteed not only by the 1st Amendment but also by state and federal laws, including the Religious Freedom Restoration Act signed by President Clinton in 1993. In balancing those interests, the court must not allow religious freedom to become an all-purpose license to discriminate. Thanks to Roberts’ judicious approach, it stopped short of creating such a blanket exception in this case.”
Editorial Board, Los Angeles Times
