ACA Mandate's Constitutionality Upheld

[Schneibster]

An appeal of an early case attempting to overset the Affordable Care Act's mandate that everyone shall buy into the health insurance pool to decrease costs has been decided to uphold the mandate by the District of Columbia Appellate Court. What will happen at the Supreme Court remains to be seen, but the opinion in the appeal shows that significant amounts of jurisprudence regarding the Commerce Clause of the Constitution that has occurred over the last two hundred years would have to be overset to declare the mandate unconstitutional. It's likely that the Supreme Court cannot find a way to rule narrowly that the mandate is unconstitutional and avoid this, and it would invalidate half the US Code if they did (there are many laws in the US Code regarding interstate commerce that were laws passed by Congress under the Commerce Clause that would become subject to challenge in that case).

The cherry on top is that the opinion in the appeal was written by a prominent conservative jurist appointed by Bush 41.

The panel in the case is comprised of two conservative judges and one liberal one. The liberal agreed with the opinion; the other conservative dissented from the opinion, but only because he would have dismissed the case outright, opining that penalties for violating the mandate amount to a "tax" and citing lack of standing by anyone to challenge the constitutionality of an as-yet-unenforced tax.

Read all about it.

[Drewish]

Yes! Finally a chance to overturn all that bullshit that's been tacked on under the Commerce Clause!

[Schneibster]

Yeah, like food safety laws.