Federal Appeals Court Rules Obamacare Individual Mandate Is Unconstitutional

A panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which is based in New Orleans, ruled on Wednesday that Obamacare’s individual mandate, which required everyone to have health insurance, was unconstitutional in its present form.

“However, the appeals court ruling largely ducked the central question of whether the Affordable Care Act remained valid after Congress removed the penalty for not having health insurance and it sent the case back to a Texas federal judge who previously ruled the entire law was unconstitutional to reconsider how much of it could survive,” Politico reported. “The high-stakes ruling keeps the legal threat to Obamacare alive while reducing the likelihood the Supreme Court could render a final verdict on the law before the 2020 elections.”

The 5th panel wrote, “The individual mandate is unconstitutional because it can no longer be read as a tax, and there is no other constitutional provision that justifies this exercise of congressional power. On the severability question, we remand to the district court to provide additional analysis of the provisions of the ACA as they currently exist.”

“Having concluded that the individual mandate is unconstitutional, we must next determine whether, or how much of, the rest of the ACA is severable from that constitutional defect,” the ruling said.

“It may still be that none of the ACA is severable from the individual mandate, even after this inquiry is concluded,” the panel added. “It may be that all of the ACA is severable from the individual mandate. It may also be that some of the ACA is severable from the individual mandate, and some is not.”

U.S. District Court Judge Reed O’Connor had ruled last December that the entire Obamacare law, known as the Affordable Care Act (ACA), was unconstitutional.

“The Fifth Circuit’s extensive and correct analysis of the constitutional question ought to humble those who were so quick to smear Judge O’Connor, a good man, as a partisan hack when he ruled as he did one year ago,” said Daily Wire Editor-at-Large Josh Hammer, a constitutional attorney by training and a former Fifth Circuit law clerk. “Those hysterical legal commentators and ‘scholars’ ought to now apologize to Judge O’Connor.”


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