The U.S. Supreme Court this morning, in California v. Texas, saved the Affordable Care Act yet again, and it wasn’t close. By a 7–2 vote, with only Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch dissenting, the Court concluded that the challengers to Obamacare did not have standing to sue over the individual mandate now that the mandate has been stripped of its monetary penalty. Justice Stephen Breyer wrote the majority opinion, and Justice Clarence Thomas — as he often does — authored a concurrence with his own view of why he came out the same way.
As I explained back in October, 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. But the Court ultimately took the wrong path. It should have found that the states had standing to sue and struck down the mandate, while leaving the rest of the statute intact.
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