Rise of the Know-Nothing Judge
If you’ve heard anything about the Texas lawsuit seeking to blow up the Affordable Care Act, you’ve heard that it involves yet another constitutional challenge to the individual mandate. That’s true—but it’s also profoundly misleading.
The parties in Texas v. United States don’t actually disagree about what the Constitution means. What they’re fighting about, instead, is what Congress meant to do, in late 2017, when it wiped out the tax penalty for going without coverage. At the time, President Donald Trump crowed, “The very unfair and unpopular Individual Mandate has been terminated as part of our Tax Cut Bill.” Congressional Republicans said the same.
In the lawsuit, however, the Trump administrationthe mandate and made it even coercive—and thus unconstitutional. Trump & Co. would also have you believe that if the (now zero-dollar) mandate is unconstitutional, so is the entire Affordable Care Act.
