A judge in Texas rules that Obamacare is unconstitutional

By I.K. | WASHINGTON, DC

LIKE WEEDS AND SUPERHEROES, the Affordable Care Act (ACA), known as Obamacare, is hard to kill. While Democrats see it as an unbroken and unbowed success, Republicans see it as a persistent creep towards socialism. Since storming Congress in 2010 they have done their best to take it down, only to find themselves stymied by internal divisions over what might replace it. Yet on December 14th a federal judge in Texas provided what many Republicans hope will be a coup de grâce to the law. It is unlikely to be so simple.

The legal contestation concerns a technicality known as severability. As originally passed, the ACA contained a requirement that all Americans obtain health insurance or pay a penalty, known as the individual mandate. When the Supreme Court was asked to weigh in on the law’s constitutionality in 2012, it held that this was a legitimate exercise of Congress’s power to tax. But while passing their tax-cut bill in 2017, Republicans also zeroed out this penalty, nixing the individual mandate. Some 20 Republican attorney-generals then sued, arguing that without the mandate, the entire law would need to be struck down as unconstitutional—in other words, that the provision was inseparable from the rest of the law.