Conversation June 21, 2021
The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act for the third time on June 17, 2021, this time in a case called California v. Texas. With seven justices holding that the states and individual plaintiffs lacked standing to sue because they failed to show that they had suffered a direct injury, the Court delivered its strongest defense of the law to date. The key parts of the previous decisions had been 5-4 and 6-3, respectively.
This result was not unpredicted. Indeed, as I wrote in November, legal experts called the arguments brought by the states and individual plaintiffs challenging the ACA “weak” and “ridiculous.”
And, as I noted at the time, the oral arguments suggested that the Court’s key...