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Predict Ye Now And Stand Known For Ye'r Thoughts Tomorrah. :mrgreen:
...[T]he Court [...] has four issues before it — three of which are somewhat clustered, and one of which stands somewhat (but not entirely) alone...
[T]he individual mandate is one of the clustered issues. The second is whether the Court has the authority to decide the fate of the mandate. And the third is whether, if the mandate is struck down as unconstitutional, other parts of the massive Affordable Care Act must fall with it — if any.
The authority-to-rule question turns upon the meaning of a section of the federal Anti-Injunction Act, first enacted by Congress in 1867... If the AIA is found to be binding in this case, then the mandate’s fate (if not repealed by Congress in the meantime) could not be decided until after it goes into effect in 2014. The final answer might not be known until sometime in 2015, after another round of court review...
But suppose the Court were to rule that AIA does not apply... Then the Court would have to move on to the second of the clustered issues: is the mandate, in fact, unconstitutional? If the Court upholds it as constitutional, that makes it unnecessary to decide the third item in the cluster: what else falls with the mandate, or does none of it fall? But if the mandate is struck down, the Court has to get to that third issue (which is called the “severability” question, because it involves deciding whether the invalid part of a law can be sliced off from all, or at least part, of the rest)...
This brings the summing-up to the fourth issue, in some ways separated. That issue is whether Congress exceeded its constitutional powers by enacting, as part of the new law, a very wide expansion of eligibility for the government-subsidized Medicaid program of providing medical care to the poor. This may be thought of as separate from the clustered three issues, because a decision not to decide the mandate and severability issues (because the AIA prevents such a ruling) would not affect the need to decide the challenge to the broader Medicaid eligibility....
The Court must then decide whether to do something it has not done to a federal law in three-quarters of a century: strike down a law that Congress enacted by using its power under the Constitution’s Spending Clause. (The mandate part of the law was based upon the Commerce Clause, not the Spending Clause.) Three times since the last use of the Court’s power to nullify a federal law was used against a Spending Clause measure, the Court has said that it might be possible that the conditions Congress imposed on someone receiving federal funds were so onerous that they would amount to coercion. In other words, the conditions actually forced the recipient of money to make a choice it would not otherwise make...
Predict Ye Now And Stand Known For Ye'r Thoughts Tomorrah. :mrgreen:
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