Quite a while ago, I put up a post on the Supreme Court case about the Affordable Care Act, talking about how the Supreme Court was basically guaranteed to uphold the Affordable Care Act in the California v. Texas case. This post will largely assume you looked through that. As it turns out, I was correct. By a 7-2 decision it was upheld.
What was surprising to me was how clear-cut the decision was. I was expecting to see a more fractured majority. There were essentially four ways for the Court to rule that would preserve the Affordable Care Act:
1) They could rule that the petitioners lacked standing (as the only "penalty" was a $0 fee), dismissing the case.
2) They could rule that, even if it was a $0 tax, it was still justified by the Taxation Clause.
3) They could rule that the whole thing didn't matter because it's justified by the Commerce Clause.
4) They could rule that the individual mandate as it stands is not constitutional and must be struck down, but could be severed from the rest of the law and leave the rest intact. As the penalty right now is nonexistent anyway, this would functionally leave the law as it was.
All of these would result in the Affordable Care Act continuing to function as it is. I was very much expecting to see a split among the justices in this area. Instead, every justice in the majority settled on #1. There was only one concurring opinion, that of Clarence Thomas, and his concurring opinion was not to express disagreement with the majority (e.g. to either say the majority opinion did not go far enough or to say he agreed with the judgment but not the reasoning), but merely to reiterate his opinion that the previous cases were decided wrongly, but that they reached the correct decision here. It seems the standing argument was more persuasive to the justices than I expected it to be.
I won't go through all of the justices and how well I thought I represented them, but there is one I want to discuss briefly. In my original post, I noted that in a "mock court" Barrett ruled that they did have standing, but that the individual mandate could be severed. But, of course, that was a practice court case. I'm sure she and the other judges did try to rule according to who they thought made the better arguments in that mock court, regardless of whether they felt that was the correct decision. Remember that oral arguments in an actual case are actually only a small part of what makes the justices decide cases; they review the decisions of the lower courts and the arguments there, as well as the many "amicus briefs" that are submitted (an "amicus brief" is an argument submitted by a third party arguing a point on the case).
But, in any event, the Affordable Care Act is still around, as predicted. Looking back, maybe this post wasn't actually that necessary... it seems I didn't have as much to say as I originally planned. Oh well.