The Affordable Care Act will not be reviewed by the Supreme Court and have its fate decided in 2020.
But that doesn't mean the controversy surrounding the 2010 healthcare legislation is over. Rather, it simply means the high court would not make an "emergency review" of the ACA, but will most likely consider the lower court rulings against it in its coming term.
"After lower court rulings came down that clearly endangered the ACA, the California State Attorney General [Democrat Xavier Becerra] filed an appeal requesting the court to make an emergency review of the legislation," Robert Henneke, general counsel at the Texas Public Policy Foundation, told Newsmax.
Henneke was a key litigator in the case that eventually struck down the ACA at the U.S. District Court level. In his December 2018 ruling, U.S. District Judge Reed O'Connor said that since the ACA requirement for Americans to buy health insurance or pay a penalty has since been voided, the entire law is unconstitutional.
On Dec. 19, 2019, a three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals in New Orleans issued a ruling agreeing with O'Connor that the piece of Obamacare known as the individual mandate was unconstitutional. But the jurists stopped short of tossing out the entire law. Rather, they sent the case back to the U.S. District Court to decide how much of it can survive that ruling.
That decision prompted Becerra to make an immediate appeal to the Supreme Court to end the uncertainty hanging over the ACA.
As the court made clear on Tuesday, it is likely to do so on its own time.
Henneke pointed out that there are already two cases dealing with severability — the judicial power to strike down only part of a statute and leave the remainder — under review by the high court.
"The court may want to decide the two cases at issue and then apply its decision to the ACA," said Henneke.
John Gizzi is chief political columnist and White House correspondent for Newsmax. For more of his reports, Go Here Now.
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