June 17, 2021 11:04AM 

# Obamacare Survives Again, But That Was to Be Expected 

By [Ilya Shapiro](https://www.cato.org/people/ilya-shapiro) 

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This morning, the Supreme Court [ruled 7–2](https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/20pdf/19-840_6jfm.pdf) that neither the states nor individual plaintiffs had standing to challenge the Affordable Care Act at this stage in the game. Ho-hum.

Those who hoped or feared that *California v. Texas* was the case where the Court would finally rid us of Obamacare were either disingenuous or misunderstood the state of play. That was never going to happen, because by leaving the rest of the ACA undisturbed after zeroing out the penalty for not complying with the individual mandate to buy health insurance—which John Roberts had transmogrified into a tax to save the law in 2012—Congress expressed the mandate’s “severability.”

Still, individuals subject to a legal command should be able to (1) secure a judgment that a “tax” that can’t raise any revenue is unconstitutional and thus (2) be excused from related regulatory provisions; that was the point [Cato’s brief](https://www.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/2020-07/california-v-texas-brief.pdf) made. The Court today disagreed—including Justice Amy Coney Barrett, whose confirmation hearings were taken over by demagogic screeds about how she was appointed to take health care away from poor people.

So be it; at this point in Obamacare litigation, to use an expression from our Alice in Wonderland age, when a mandate can be a tax and a state exchange can be a federal one, “lol nothing matters.”

For more background on the case, [go here](https://www.cato.org/legal-briefs/california-v-texas). To read an essay explaining the brief Josh Blackman and I filed for Cato, [go here](https://www.scotusblog.com/2020/11/symposium-the-individual-plaintiffs-in-california-v-texas-suffer-a-greater-article-iii-injury-than-did-the-individual-plaintiffs-in-nfib-v-sebelius/).

##### Related Tags 

[Constitutional Law](https://www.cato.org/constitutional-law), [Health Care](https://www.cato.org/health-care), [Supreme Court](https://www.cato.org/supreme-court) 

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