Supreme Court ignores the Tenth Amendment.

Supreme Court Tosses Obamacare Challenge by 18 States on Grounds of Legal Standing
BY MATTHEW VADUM June 17, 2021 Updated: June 17, 2021 biggersmaller Print
By a vote of 7 to 2 the Supreme Court has upheld the Obamacare law for the third time, ducking the question of its constitutionality by ruling that those challenging it lacked the required legal standing to do so.

The law was enacted in March 2010 without a single Republican vote in Congress on final passage. Insurance premiums have since skyrocketed, and many consumers have been unable to afford premiums and have lost their insurance. In 2016 Forbes wrote that there is “overwhelming evidence that Obamacare caused premiums to increase substantially.”

Judge Reed O’Connor of the Northern District of Texas ruled on Dec. 14, 2018, that the Obamacare law was unconstitutional in its entirety, but stayed enforcement during the appeals process.

When Congress in 2017 effectively repealed the mandate that compelled Americans to buy health insurance, it “sawed off the last leg it [Obamacare] stood on,” the judge held. “The court finds the individual mandate ‘is essential to’ and inseverable from ‘the other provisions of’” the statute.

The case is actually two cases that were heard together–California v. Texas, court file 19-840, and Texas v. California, court file 19-1019. A telephonic hearing on Nov. 10, 2020, in the consolidated cases lasted 121 minutes, running over the 80 minutes scheduled.

The majority opinion was written by Justice Stephen Breyer. It was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.

Justice Samuel Alito wrote a dissenting opinion, which Justice Neil Gorsuch joined.

As originally enacted in 2010, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, popularly known as the Obamacare law, required most Americans to obtain minimum essential health insurance coverage, Breyer wrote for the court.

The statute also “imposed a monetary penalty, scaled according to income, upon individuals who failed to do so.” Congress “effectively nullified” the penalty by setting its amount at $0 in 2017.

“Texas and 17 other States brought this lawsuit against the United States and federal officials. They were later joined by two individuals (Neill Hurley and John Nantz). The plaintiffs claim that without the penalty the Act’s minimum essential coverage requirement is unconstitutional.

“Specifically, they say neither the Commerce Clause nor the Tax Clause (nor any other enumerated power) grants Congress the power to enact it. … They also argue that the minimum essential coverage requirement is not severable from the rest of the Act. Hence, they believe the Act as a whole is invalid.

“We do not reach these questions of the Act’s validity, however, for Texas and the other plaintiffs in this suit lack the standing necessary to raise them.”