WASHINGTON — A clearly divided Supreme Court cast serious doubts on the Obama administration’s signature health care law Tuesday, emboldening the Republicans who now are eagerly campaigning to kill it.
WASHINGTON — A clearly divided Supreme Court cast serious doubts on the Obama administration’s signature health care law Tuesday, emboldening the Republicans who now are eagerly campaigning to kill it.
In a historic clash that foreshadows a close election-year decision, justices revealed sharp splits about whether Congress went too far in mandating that U.S. residents buy health insurance or pay a penalty. But while the justices appear as divided as the country itself, skepticism dominated during the unusually long oral arguments.
“The federal government is not supposed to be a government that has all powers,” Justice Antonin Scalia said. “It’s supposed to be a government of limited powers. … If the government can do this, what else can it not do?”
Scalia sounded unrelievedly dubious about the health care law, as did his conservative colleague Justice Samuel Alito and, to a somewhat lesser extent, Chief Justice John Roberts.
In a potentially sobering sign for the Obama administration, even the justice most commonly considered to be a swing vote made pointed observations about the insurance-buying mandate.
“When you are changing the relationship of the individual to the government in this … unique away, do you not have a heavy burden of justification to show authorization under the Constitution?” Justice Anthony Kennedy pressed the administration’s chief lawyer, Solicitor General Donald Verrilli Jr.
Verrilli stressed throughout his hour at the lectern that the 40 million uninsured Americans posed what he called “an economic problem” that Congress is empowered to fix. He found some sympathy from at least a few justices, though they did not appear to be a majority of the nine-member court.
“People are getting cost-free health care, and the only way to avoid that is to get them to pay sooner rather than later, pay up front,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said.
Justice Elena Kagan, Verrilli’s predecessor as solicitor general, added that “the effect of all these uninsured people is to raise everybody’s premiums,” while Justice Stephen Breyer noted that “there is a national problem that involves money, cost (and) insurance.”
The two-hour argument Tuesday morning was the second of three days devoted to challenges of the Obama administration’s health care law. By several measures, it also was the most important day.
Legally, the individual mandate that Florida and 25 other states are challenging is at the heart of the 2,700-page law that passed in 2010. The mandate’s fate will shape future Congresses’ ability to invoke the constitutional authority to tax or regulate commerce.
The individual mandate still sparks the most visceral response from opponents of the health care law. Republicans insist that they’ll repeal the law, while tea party activists rallied outside the court Tuesday to show again the motivated muscle that helped the Republican Party reclaim control of the House of Representatives in 2010.
The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act requires that taxpayers obtain a minimum level of health coverage by 2014. With some exceptions, those who don’t must pay annual fees that start at $95 in 2015 and rise to $695 by 2016. Alternatively, the fee may be set as a percentage of household income.