by Jeremy Leaming
When the Supreme Court announced in fall 2011 that it would review the constitutionality of the landmark health care reform law, civil rights groups and constitutional experts tried to highlight the lawsuits' threat to the expansion of Medicaid coverage -- and what it would mean if the Supreme Court adopted the states' arguements against the expansion. If the high court were to decide that Congress had overstepped its spending power by penalizing states for not joining in the expansion of Medicaid it could have a potentially profound impact on other progressive laws, such as the Title VI of the Civil Rights Act and Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972.
Writing for Slate, Simon Lazarus and Dahlia Lithwick warned that if the high court were to side with the states’ argument against the Affordable Care Act’s expansion of Medicaid (the states argued that they were being unconstitutionally coerced into expanding Medicaid) then other programs run by the states with federal dollars could be in jeopardy. The ACA sought to expand Medicaid coverage to adults below 133 percent of the Federal Poverty Line. In a 2011 ACS Issue Brief, Lazarus, senior counsel at the Constitutional Accountability Center, described the states’ arguments against the Medicaid expansion as proposing “a radical upheaval in applicable constitutional law.”
But the National Women’s Law Center’s Emily J. Martin in an ACS Issue Brief released today argues that the majority’s spending clause analysis from the high court’s ACA opinion from late June does not pose a danger to the major federal law aimed at stopping discrimination against women – Title IX.
Title IX, in part, states, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance ….”
Martin, vice president and general counsel at NWLC, provides great detail on why the Roberts Court’s spending clause analysis would not undermine the antidiscrimination law and also notes that even if Title IX were vulnerable to a spending clause challenge based on the ACA decision, it would still survive because it is an appropriate means for Congress to enforce the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause.
has been given to the landmark health care reform law’s minimum coverage provision. That provision requires Americans, who can afford to do so, to purchase a minimum amount of health care insurance starting in 2014 or pay a penalty on their income tax returns. Indeed this