Texas judge rules Obamacare is unconstitutional

  I was busy last night so I was not able to blog or to even keep up with the news until I got home so naturally some big news had to break. I am of course talking about the ruling in Texas yesterday and the fact that the courts struck down Obamacare as being unconstitutional.

  The Supreme Court had previously ruled that the healthcare law was legal when Chief Justice Roberts reinterpreted the mandate by declaring it was a tax and thereby constitutional when ironically the government was arguing it was not a tax.

  Now a judge in Texas has ruled that because the mandate was repealed in 2017 the whole law is unconstitutional. Here is more:

since Congress removed the individual mandate in 2017, O’Connor ruled, there’s no way the ACA can be allowed to stand.

“The Individual Mandate can no longer be fairly read as an exercise of Congress’s Tax Power and is still impermissible under the Interstate Commerce Clause — meaning the Individual Mandate is unconstitutional,” O’Connor wrote. “The Individual Mandate is essential to and inseverable from the remainder of the ACA.”

Without the system being upheld by a wide pool of mandated participants, the ACA cannot stand, O’Connor ruled.

“Without it, Congress and the Supreme Court have stated, the architectural design fails,” according to O’Connor. “It is like watching a slow game of Jenga, each party poking at a different provision to see if the ACA falls.”

  Now, I agree with what this judge said about the mandate being inseverable from the remainder of the law however I am not sure I agree with the logic he used to declare the whole law unconstitutional.

  Let me explain: To me the one part of Obamacare that was unconstitutional was the mandate, so I fail to see how removing the unconstitutional part of the legislation makes the rest of the legislation unconstitutional. It is true that without the mandate the healthcare act will not function in the long run and so it seems to me this judge is confusing functionality with constitutionality.

  It is not up to a judge to determine if a law is functional. But maybe I am splitting hairs here and do not get me wrong, I am not trying to defend a law I believe needs to be repealed and replaced.

  Anyway, this battle is far from over and this ruling is going to be appealed, and it will eventually make it back to the Supreme Court where it will be interesting to see how John Roberts rules this time around. He had to play verbal twister to uphold the law the first time around so who knows how he will rule the next time.

  And then there is newly minted Justice Kavanaugh, who is already 0-1 with conservatives after he sided with Planned Parenthood last week…

malo periculosam libertatem quam quietum servitium