ACA Oral Arguments Blogging Symposium

By Rebecca L. Brown, Newton Professor of Constitutional Law at the USC Gould School of Law

During Tuesday’s argument, Justice Scalia asked whether the individual mandate, even if “necessary,” was also “proper.” He may well have had good reasons to focus on this language, and the Necessary and Proper Clause, to which it refers.

In 2005, Justice Scalia wrote separately in a Commerce Clause case to emphasize that conduct can be regulated if it is “an essential part of a larger regulation of economic activity….”  He added, “where Congress has the authority to enact a regulation of interstate commerce, it possesses every power needed to make that regulation effective.” The question in the case, Gonzales v. Raich, was whether the federal drug laws could reach the cultivation and possession of marijuana for personal use as authorized by state law. Justice Scalia wrote that, when the federal government puts in place a comprehensive regulatory scheme that falls within the power to regulate interstate commerce (such as the interstate drug laws) then it may also impose additional requirements, even over matters that it could not regulate in isolation (such as wholly intrastate, non-commercial activity, like the growing of marijuana)—if those additional requirements are “necessary and proper” to effectuate the larger federal scheme.   

Many of us read that plausible analysis to suggest an analogous approach to the Affordable Care Act. Congress has unquestioned authority to regulate the interstate and commercial matters of health care and insurance. In turn, as Justice Scalia made clear in Raich, additional rules that are necessary and proper to the functioning of the overall system of regulating those markets can be constitutionally adopted by Congress-- even if those additional rules might be of questionable validity if passed in isolation. 

There is no dispute that the individual mandate is necessary, even essential, to effectuate the congressional policy of requiring insurers to offer coverage without regard to pre-existing conditions. Without the individual mandate, people would be free to wait to buy insurance until they needed expensive medical care, which would undercut the role of insurance as a pooling of risk. Assuming, then, that Justice Scalia would maintain consistency with his prior views, many thought that he could be counted on as a vote to uphold the individual mandate.

But, apparently realizing the import of his prior opinion, Justice Scalia on Tuesday laid the groundwork for backing away from it. While conceding that the individual mandate is “necessary” to the federal scheme, he questioned whether it is also “proper.” Why might it not be proper? In an exercise of utterly circular reasoning, Justice Scalia suggested that it might not be “proper” because it goes beyond the limits of Congress’s limited powers.   

By Sergio Eduardo Muñoz, Senior Policy Analyst, Health Policy Project, Office of Research, Advocacy, and Legislation, National Council of La Raza. This post is part of an ACSblog online symposium on oral argument in HHS v. Florida.

Yesterday’s Day 2 Affordable Care Act (ACA) arguments at the Supreme Court involved the centerpiece of both health care reform and its legal challenges by examining whether the individual responsibility requirement to carry health insurance exceeds Congress’s powers under the Constitution. And unfortunately, it didn’t take long for it to become painfully clear that this question of enormous consequence may very well split down ideological lines. During his confirmation hearings, Chief Justice Roberts used the analogy that a federal judge is like an umpire, objectively calling balls and strikes under commonly accepted rules. If anything good came out of Tuesday’s acrimonious argument, maybe we can finally put that misleading visual to rest. The Justices’ sharp comments on the constitutionality of the responsibility requirement made clear that not only are the Court’s ideological wings calling these pitches differently, it’s not even clear they’re playing the same game.

Before describing today’s fireworks, however, some cold facts underlying today’s arguments and what the responsibility requirement does and does not do. If the responsibility requirement was in effect today, also referred to as the “individual mandate,” only 7% of the country under-65 would have to newly buy insurance or pay the tax penalty for non-compliance. Of those, over half would receive generous subsidies to assist in the purchase of insurance in newly-regulated markets. The vast majority of Americans would not have to decide how to satisfy the responsibility requirement because they already have insurance or would be exempt from purchase because of the economic strain. Take the Hispanic community, for example. Considering uninsured Latino children in comparison to other groups are disproportionately underenrolled in Medicaid and CHIP, despite the fact that Hispanics are about two times more likely than Whites to qualify for public health insurance, the odds are slim that this community would have to choose between new insurance and the assessment. This truth, unfortunately, has not been successfully communicated.