Yesterday, the Judicial Education Project (along with the Center for Individual Rights and Cooper & Kirk, PLLC) filed an amicus brief in Halbig v. Sebelius on behalf of Senators John Cornyn, Ted Cruz, Orrin Hatch, Mike Lee, Rob Portman, Marco Rubio, and Congressmen Dave Camp and Darrell Issa. Halbig is one of several cases challenging the Internal Revenue Service’s tax regulations under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) based on exhaustive analysis of the language, history, and purposes of the ACA. Several other organizations have filed amicus briefs, including the Cato Institute, Competitive Enterprise Institute, Consumers’ Research, the Galen Institute, and the Pacific Research Institute, and several states. This is an unusual number of amicus briefs to be filed at the circuit court level, highlighting the unusual importance of this case.
These cases raise important issues of statutory interpretation that go to the core of the Constitution’s separation of powers and will dramatically affect the size of the administrative state in coming years.
Over the next couple posts, I will give a technical overview of the issues in the case and the arguments we raise in our amicus brief. Stay tuned. If you can’t wait to learn more, see this article by Bench Memos colleague Jonathan Adler, professor of law at Case Western Reserve University’s law school, and Michael Cannon, Director of Health Policy Studies at the Cato Institute, who is collecting additional resources about the case here.