Thread: Obamacare ruled unconstitutional by Texas judge

Obamacare ruled unconstitutional by Texas judge

By Matt Richardson
Published 3 hours ago
Last Update 2 hours ago

The Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, was struck down by a Texas judge on Friday, a move that could suddenly disrupt the health insurance status of millions of Americans. The decision comes amid a six-week open enrollment period for the program.

Texas, along with 19 states, had argued to U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor that they had been hurt by a jump in the amount of people utilizing state-backed insurance. When Congress cut the tax penalty from the program in 2017, the states claimed, it essentially undercut the Supreme Court’s reasoning for finding former President Barack Obama’s signature legislation constitutional in 2012.

“The remainder of the ACA is non-severable from the individual mandate, meaning that the Act must be invalidated in whole,” O’Connor wrote in a 55-page opinion, according to Bloomberg. O'Connor is a conservative Republican appointee who previously blocked other Obama-era policies.

"As I predicted all along, Obamacare has been struck down as an UNCONSTITUTIONAL disaster," President Trump tweeted following the ruling. "Now Congress must pass a STRONG law that provides GREAT healthcare and protects pre-existing conditions. Mitch and Nancy, get it done!"

In a second tweet, the president declared the ruling to be "great news for America!"

California and other states ruled against by the judge will likely challenge the decision by appealing in the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit.

“Today’s ruling is an assault on 133 million Americans with pre-existing conditions, on the 20 million Americans who rely on the A.C.A.’s consumer protections for health care, on America’s faithful progress toward affordable health care for all Americans,” Xavier Becerra, California’s attorney general, said in a statement, according to The New York Times. “The A.C.A. has already survived more than 70 unsuccessful repeal attempts and withstood scrutiny in the Supreme Court.”

“Obamacare has been struck down by a highly respected judge," White House press secretary Sarah Sanders said in a statement.

"The judge’s decision vindicates President Trump’s position that Obamacare is unconstitutional," Sanders continued. "Once again, the President calls on Congress to replace Obamacare and act to protect people with preexisting conditions and provide Americans with quality affordable healthcare. We expect this ruling will be appealed to the Supreme Court. Pending the appeal process, the law remains in place.”

Democratic leaders, meanwhile, reacted harshly to the decision.

"The ruling seems to be based on faulty legal reasoning and hopefully it will be overturned," Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., tweeted. "Americans who care about working families must do all they can to prevent this district court ruling from becoming law."

“While the district court’s absurd ruling will be immediately appealed, Republicans are fully responsible for this cruel decision and for the fear they have struck into millions of families across America who are now in danger of losing their health coverage," House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said in a statement. "When House Democrats take the gavel, the House of Representatives will move swiftly to formally intervene in the appeals process to uphold the life-saving protections for people with pre-existing conditions and reject Republicans’ effort to destroy the Affordable Care Act.”

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/oba...by-texas-judge

I totally and completely agree with this Federal Judge, Reed O'Connor! Great news! Thank you Texas!!

Thank you President Trump for eliminating the individual mandate in your tax cuts legislation!

Good Republicans working together to fix our country.

Oh I heard something, oops, I think John McCain just rolled over in his grave.

LOL!! DemoQuacks are FREAKING OUT!!! Hee, Hee.

BREAKING: Republican judge issues order striking down Obamacare

Why respect the rule of law when you can be a partisan hack?
Ian Millhiser
Dec 14, 2018, 8:31 pm

Last February, a bloc of 20 Republican governors and attorneys general brought a lawsuit seeking to repeal the Affordable Care Act. Then they ran into a problem. Some of these officials faced reelection races in 2018. Others sought higher office. And repealing Obamacare is unpopular.

One of these officials, Senator-elect Josh Hawley (R-MO) even ran an ad where he lied to his state’s voters and claimed that he supports “forcing insurance companies to cover all pre-existing conditions,” even as he litigated a suit seeking to eliminate these protections for people with preexisting conditions.

But these Republicans were clever, and they found a solution to their political dilemma. The Republican officials filed their case in Fort Worth, Texas, where the only active federal district judge is Reed O’Connor, a highly partisan judge with a long history of striking down Democratic policies on spurious legal reasoning.

This effort to get this case before Judge O’Connor proved to be a stroke of genius. On Friday, O’Connor issued his decision purporting to repeal Obamacare. Even better, O’Connor waited until after the midterm elections were over to issue his decision — ensuring that his partisan legal opinion would not step on the GOP’s efforts to deceive voters into believing that they would protect people with preexisting conditions.

O’Connor’s laughable reasoning

The premise of O’Connor’s opinion in Texas v. United States is that Congress’ decision to repeal a single provision of the Affordable Care Act necessarily requires the courts to repeal the entire law. O’Connor justified this result through a two-step argument — the first part of which is plausible but largely academic, and the second part of which is laughable.

As enacted in 2010, the Affordable Care Act requires most Americans to either carry health insurance or pay higher income taxes. This is the law’s “individual mandate,” which encourages people to buy health insurance before they become sick. In NFIB v. Sebelius, the Supreme Court held that this individual mandate is a valid exercise of Congress’ power to tax.
Seven years later, the Trump tax law effectively repealed this individual mandate. Though the 2017 legislation leaves in place most of the Affordable Care Act’s language establishing an individual mandate, it reduces the amount of the tax to zero — rendering the mandate a nullity.

The first step of O’Connor’s argument claims that this lifeless husk of a mandate is unconstitutional. Though the mandate currently does absolutely nothing, the law still contains language providing that most Americans “shall” obtain health coverage. NFIB upheld this language as an exercise of Congress’ power to tax, but the zeroed-out mandate no longer functions as a tax. So O’Connor claims that the neutered mandate is unconstitutional.

This is the least ridiculous part of O’Connor’s opinion, but the consequences of this part of his decision should be nonexistent. Congress already stripped the mandate of any real effect, and the practical impact of a court decision striking down a law that does nothing should be nothing.

But O’Connor’s opinion then takes a turn away from legal reasoning and into partisan cosplay.

When a court strikes down part of a statute, it often must ask whether other, constitutional provisions of the law must fall along with the unconstitutional provision. This inquiry is known as “severability,” and it is an entirely speculative inquiry. It asks which hypothetical law Congress would have passed if Congress had known that it lacked the power to enact the one provision that was just struck down.

But such speculation is unnecessary in a case such as Texas, because Congress already answered this question. The Republican Congress spent much of 2017 debating how much of the Affordable Care Act to repeal. In the end, they only had the votes to repeal one provision, the individual mandate, and so that’s what they did.

Even if you assume that O’Connor is correct that the inert mandate is unconstitutional, he does not need to speculate which other provisions Congress would have wanted to strip away because Congress already answered this question. In the Trump tax law, Congress effectively repealed the individual mandate while leaving the rest of Obamacare intact. That’s conclusive evidence that Congress preferred to leave the rest of Obamacare intact.

It’s worth noting, moreover, the the Supreme Court specifically instructed judges not to cut too deeply into federal laws when they conduct a severability inquiry. As the Court explained in Murphy v. National Collegiate Athletic Association, “in order for other . . . provisions to fall,” the Murphy held, “it must be ‘evident that [Congress] would not have enacted those provisions which are within its power, independently of [those] which [are] not.’”

Nevertheless, O’Connor ignores Congress’ clearly expressed intent and constructs a fantasy world where Congress intended an entirely different result. Congress stated that ” the Individual Mandate is ‘essential’ to the ACA,” O’Connor writes — a fact that is partially true about the law Congress passed in 2010. It’s also an irrelevant fact because the 2017 Congress has the power to reach a different conclusion.

So now what?

In the short term, O’Connor’s order is nothing more than a hate letter to the Supreme Court, advising them of just how much this one judge dislikes Obamacare. Though O’Connor declared that the law is invalid, he denied the plaintiff state’s request for an injunction. That means that, as a practical matter, his order should have no immediate effect.

In the ordinary course of business, O’Connor’s order would appeal to the very conservative United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, and ultimately to the Supreme Court. Five judges on this court are Trump appointees, and several of the other Republicans are among the most conservative judges on the federal bench, so there is a very real danger that the Fifth Circuit panel that hears this case will share O’Connor’s hatred of Obamacare.

Should the Fifth Circuit affirm O’Connor’s decision, the case is all-but-certain to wind up in the Supreme Court, where it still faces long odds. This is not the first, or the second, time that Chief Justice John Roberts has been asked to weigh a wild legal theory claiming that Obamacare must be struck down or significantly wounded. In the last such case, Roberts signaled pretty clearly that he’s tired of hearing these kinds of political lawsuits.

So the smart money suggests that at least one of the Supreme Court’s Republicans will join the four Democrats in saving the law. But Texas v. United States also feels familiar in a different way. For the third time since Obamacare became law, an outlandish legal theory was treated seriously by a deeply ideological federal judge — and now the case seems destined for Supreme Court review. And, if past is prologue, it is likely that at least three members of the Supreme Court will embrace literally any legal theory that attacks Obamacare.

https://thinkprogress.org/breaking-r...-967945c56a97/

BREAKING: Obamacare ruled unconstitutional by federal judge… era of forced government health insurance tyranny comes to an end

(Natural News) In a stunning ruling that's sending shock waves across the nation, a federal judge has ruled that Obamacare -- the deceptively named "Affordable Care Act" -- violates the United States Constitution and must be dismantled. "U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor in Fort Worth agreed with a coalition of Republican states led by … [Read More...]

Friday, December 14, 2018 by: Mike Adams
Tags: ACA, court decision, health care, health freedom, health insurance, Liberty, obamacare, Trump, unconstitutional

1,000 Views
(Natural News) In a stunning ruling that’s sending shock waves across the nation, a federal judge has ruled that Obamacare — the deceptively named “Affordable Care Act” — violates the United States Constitution and must be dismantled.

“U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor in Fort Worth agreed with a coalition of Republican states led by Texas that he had to eviscerate the Affordable Care Act, the signature health-care overhaul by President Barack Obama, after Congress last year zeroed out a key provision — the tax penalty for not complying with the requirement to buy insurance,” reported Bloomberg.
The ruling immediately infuriated Democrats who believe that government has the right to force citizens to purchase insurance products they largely don’t want. The entire basis of the ACA is unconstitutional and was only passed because U.S. Supreme Court Justice Roberts was coerced into declaring the Obamacare non-compliance penalties to be a “tax.” When the U.S. Congress zeroed out that tax as part of a tax reform package, the entire justification for SCOTUS declaring the ACA to be constitutional evaporated.
As Bloomberg explains:
Texas and an alliance of 19 states argued to the judge that they’ve been harmed by an increase in the number of people on state-supported insurance rolls. They claimed that when Congress last year repealed the tax penalty for the so-called individual mandate, it eliminated the U.S. Supreme Court’s rationale for finding the ACA constitutional in 2012. The Texas judge agreed.
Judge O’Conner, who issued the rule eviscerating Obamacare, explained the logic behind the ruling, saying, “Congress stated many times unequivocally — through enacted text signed by the president — that the individual mandate is ‘essential’ to the ACA… And this essentiality, the ACA’s text makes clear, means the mandate must work ‘together with the other provisions’ for the Act to function as intended.”
This means Obamacare has finally been put to death in a long-needed mercy killing.
President Trump celebrated the decision as “Great news for America!”
The ruling also means that the late Sen. John McCain, a vindictive traitor who betrayed America in order to personally spite Donald Trump, has failed yet again, even after his death. With ACA overturned, McCain’s refusal to vote for the repeal and replacement of Obamacare has become a moot point, rendering his attempt to thwart the Trump administration largely irrelevant.
This ruling will be appealed and is headed to the U.S. Supreme Court. There, the two new justices appointed by President Trump — Gorsuch and Kavanaugh — are widely expected to uphold the district ruling, confirming that Obamacare has always been unconstitutional.

Obamacare has been an illegal fraud from the very first day

Obamacare has always been a fraud, and just like everything promoted by Democrats, it was only achieved through an astonishing level of coordinated deception, public relations spin and outright fraud. Remember, “If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor?”
It has always been a lie from the very start. Obamacare has finally been defeated. Next step? Arrest and indict Barack Obama for treason, international money laundering, illegal spying on U.S. citizens and acts of terrorism deliberately committed against the United States of America (such as Operation Fast & Furious, an Obama scheme to criminalize firearms in America).



https://www.naturalnews.com/2018-12-...to-an-end.html

If you want to fix the cost of health insurance in the US, all you have to do is repeal the McCarran-Ferguson Act of 1945, at least for health insurance, which is Trump's "erase the lines", so nationwide and large regional policies can be sold across state lines. This repeal passed the US House of Representatives overwhelmingly on March 22, 2017, not one newspaper or MSM covered its passage, it now sits in a committee in the US Senate. Please Mitch, tell the committee to vote on it, get it on the floor and call a vote immediately. Thank you. Republicans should get credit for this because the Republican House passed it at Trump's urging. Please get it done.

Now get illegal aliens OFF our healthcare and OUT of our country.



They have no right to FORCE us to foot the bill for healthcare for illegal aliens!!!

They have NO right to be here and the government has NO right to make Americans pay for this!

We also foot the bill for uninsured motorist! They should not have drivers license, they do not pay car insurance, we get slaughtered and WE foot the bill while they run off!!! Deport them!