The Trump administration and a coalition of states led by Republicans are asking the U.S. Supreme Court to wait on reviewing a lawsuit challenging the Affordable Care Act (ACA), also known as Obamacare.
In filings on Feb. 3, the federal government and state officials from a group of conservative states said the House and Democratic-led states offered “no compelling reason” for the Supreme Court to grant a review of a case that was still being decided by a lower court. They urged the court to defer the review of the decision until after the case has completed its proceedings in the lower courts.
Following the congressional action, a group of red states and two private individuals filed a lawsuit claiming that the provision was no longer constitutional and that the entire ACA needed to be invalidated because the provision was inseverable from the rest of the law.
A district court judge in Texas found in favor of the plaintiffs, prompting an appeal to the appeals court. The appeals court upheld the plaintiffs’ constitutional claims and sent the case back to the district court for a more detailed review of the question of severability.
“Deferring review until the litigation in the lower courts is complete thus may help to streamline this Court’s eventual consideration if and when it considers the severability issue and to avoid a partially advisory opinion in the meantime,” he added.
He argued that there was no need to rush the case to the Supreme Court at this time as the “individual mandate no longer subjects any individual to any concrete consequence.”
“Although the court of appeals and petitioners draw different legal conclusions from the elimination of the monetary penalty, it is common ground that noncompliance with the individual mandate no longer carries any significant real-world consequence,” he wrote. “On either view of the merits—i.e., whether the elimination of the shared-responsibility payment renders the individual mandate now invalid, or valid but merely precatory—the question of the mandate’s validity is not itself a matter of any practical urgency.”