The government’s reply brief on Obamacare’s Medicaid expansion (“Obamacaid”) provides a competent, confident defense of the statute. It also provides occasion to revisit the parties’ positions one more time and to draw two conclusions. One: in attempting to buttress a losing argument against Obamacaid, the plaintiff-states may have detracted, unwittingly, from a winning argument against Obamacare’s “health benefit exchanges.” Two: the true problem isn’t Obamacaid’s constitutionality but its pernicious political economy.
The PPACA Mandate: The Government’s Best Case
The Obamacare plaintiffs, I’ve noted here, have a point: a federal mandate to purchase health insurance raises enumerated powers problems of a sort that mere prohibitory regulations—“don’t do X”—do not. Today, let’s hear it for the feds. With the exception of narrowly cabined “mandates” that ensure the operation of the federal government’s own institutions (such as juries and the armed forces), say plaintiffs, the federal government has never compelled performance as a condition of lawful residence in the United States. That’s a pretty potent argument. The government’s response is that a congressional failure to exercise a particular power doesn’t mean that…
Obamacaid Revisited
In the pending Obamacare litigation, the plaintiff-states argue that Title II of the Affordable Care Act (“Obamacaid”) unconstitutionally “coerces” them to participate in a grand expansion of Medicaid. I’ve argued here and there (link no longer available) that the plaintiffs will and should lose that argument. A terrific amicus brief (link no longer available) by Vanderbilt Law School professor James Blumstein makes a powerful case on the other side.
Ultimately, Jim’s brief doesn’t fully persuade me. But it comes very, very close on account of its recognition that Obamacaid’s crucial problem has to do with the bilateral risk of opportunistic defection from a pre-existing, quasi-contractual relation (Medicaid), not with some “economic coercion” story about federalism’s “balance” and the poor, pitiful states and their faithful public servants. (For ConLaw dorks: the key cases are Pennhurst and Printz, not South Dakota v. Dole or Steward Machine.) I hope to explain sometime next week; today, a few additional remarks on economic coercion.
Obamacare: The States’ Rights and Wrongs
Briefs have been trickling into the U.S. Supreme Court in the Obamacare cases. Soon, they’ll come flooding: briefing on the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate is starting today.
