The Latest Hits from The Supremes
To read the news, you’d think the Supreme Court had just handed supporters of Obamacare a great big win.
But the decision is slightly less than an expression of strong political support, because for one thing courts are not supposed to be political or set policies. (Feel free to LOL at that one.) More importantly, just read the lead paragraph in this article.
The Supreme Court on Thursday threw out a lawsuit threatening the entirety of the Affordable Care Act, finding that Republican-led states behind the case did not have legal ground [sic] to challenge the landmark health care law.
And, yes, throwing the appeal out “preserves health insurance for millions and the law’s popular protections for preexisting conditions” and “may serve as the final chapter in the decade-long legal assault on the Affordable Care Act” (italics mine), but the reason it can is that the Supreme Court said that the parties who challenged the law lacked standing.
This is the kind of thing that non-lawyers tend to call a “technicality.” However, legal procedure and the need to establish the elements required to have a “cause of action” (to use the legal parlance for ability to bring a lawsuit) are actually the law. They just don’t provide a ruling on any substantive legal issue, like (for instance) a law’s constitutionality.
Justice Stephen Breyer wrote the opinion, which was joined by the High Court’s two intrepid liberal justices and all but two of the conservative ones. Apparently, they all agreed that the “red states and individual plaintiffs” didn’t meet the qualifications needed to bring a lawsuit. And, according to this article, as a result “the conservative justices were essentially shielded from grappling with larger questions about whether Obamacare was no longer constitutional.”
So, when you come down to it, nothing much was decided.
In a concurring opinion, Justice Clarence Thomas had this to add, “Although this Court has erred twice before in cases involving the Affordable Care Act, it does not err today.”
Oddly enough, that’s the closest the court came to rendering an actual opinion.
PS: The Supremes did decide that a religious adoption agency can refuse to work with LGTBQ people seeking to adopt.
This actual ruling “comes after the court previously upheld same-sex adoption in 2016, and after the court issued several other narrowly-tailored rulings in favor of religious liberty in recent years,” so draw your own conclusions about all that.
PPS: It appears that antitrust law is not dead. It just has no favors to offer ebook authors. Yet.
PPPS: Is it something in the water?
PPPPS: Further proof that Washington, DC, is just another small town.
PPPPPS: Random Mac tip: To make this sign on a Mac — £–just hold OPTION and SHIFT-3 simultaneously for the hashtag, i.e., the pound sign. Get it? 🙂
Anyone still alive who knows that this — # — used to be called a pound sign? 🙂
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