Yuval Levin, a prominent conservative commentator, wrote at the National Review that the Texas lawsuit “ doesn’t even merit being called silly. The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board labeled this lawsuit the “ Texas ObamaCare Blunder.” Ilya Shapiro of the Cato Institute, another conservative lawyer who fought hard to destroy Obamacare in previous cases, wrote that he was “ quite skeptical” that even a very conservative appeals court would embrace the plaintiffs’ legal arguments in Texas. Jonathan Adler, a conservative law professor and one of the leading evangelists for an earlier lawsuit seeking to undercut the Affordable Care Act, labeled many of these latest arguments against Obamacare “implausible,” “hard to justify,” and “surprisingly weak.” The plaintiffs’ legal reasoning in Texas isn’t simply rejected by liberal and centrist legal experts - it’s even rejected by many lawyers who spent a good part of their career trying to convince federal courts to repeal Obamacare. They then argued that the courts should repeal the entire Affordable Care Act because of this alleged defect in one provision of the law. Judge Carolyn Dineen King, a Carter appointee, dissented.īriefly, the plaintiffs argued the individual mandate - or, at least, the shell that remains of it - is unconstitutional.
FIFTH CIRCUIT COURT OF APPEALS OPINIONS TRIAL
Yet while a trial judge held that the whole law must be repealed, the appeals court dodges this question, saying that Reed O’Connor, the staunchly conservative trial judge who struck down the entire law, must redo his analysis.Įlrod’s decision was joined by Judge Kurt Engelhardt - both Elrod and Engelhardt are Republican appointees. Judge Jennifer Elrod’s opinion holds that what remains of the individual mandate - a provision of the Affordable Care Act that currently does nothing because Congress repealed the only consequence for violating this mandate - is unconstitutional.
Instead, in their opinion Wednesday, they punted on the biggest question: whether the entire law should be repealed. United States, a lawsuit over Obamacare, was argued last summer, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit appeared determined to repeal the entire law root and branch.