Don’t have time to read the full 193 pages from today’s 5-4 Supreme Court decision? Here are some pull quotes from the opinions:

Chief Justice Robert’s majority opinion

  • “We do not consider whether the Act embodies sound policies.”
  • “Members of this Court are vested with the authority to interpret the law; we possess neither the expertise nor the prerogative to make policy judgments. Those decisions are entrusted to our Nation’s elected leaders, who can be thrown out of office if the people disagree with them. It is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.”
  • “Given its expansive scope, it is no surprise that Con­gress has employed the commerce power in a wide variety of ways to address the pressing needs of the time. But Congress has never attempted to rely on that power to compel individuals not engaged in commerce to purchase an unwanted product. Legislative novelty is not nec­essarily fatal; there is a first time for everything. But sometimes ‘the most telling indication of [a] severe con­stitutional problem . . . is the lack of historical precedent’ for Congress’s action.”
  • “Congress addressed the insurance problem by ordering everyone to buy insurance. Under the Gov­ernment’s theory, Congress could address the diet problem by ordering everyone to buy vegetables. People, for reasons of their own, often fail to do things that would be good for them or good for society. Those failures—joined with the similar failures of others—can readily have a substantial effect on interstate commerce. Under the Government’s logic, that authorizes Congress to use its commerce power to compel citizens to act as the Government would have them act. That is not the country the Framers of our Constitution envisioned.”
  • “Everyone will likely participate in the markets for food, clothing, transportation, shelter, or energy; that does not authorize Congress to direct them to purchase particular products in those or other markets today. The Commerce Clause is not a general license to regulate an individual from cradle to grave, simply because he will predictably engage in particular transactions. Any police power to regulate individuals as such, as opposed to their activities, remains vested in the States.”
  • “The individual mandate forces individuals into commerce precisely because they elected to refrain from commercial activity. Such a law cannot be sustained under a clause authorizing Congress to ‘regulate Commerce.’”
  • “Just as the individual mandate cannot be sustained as a law regulating the substantial effects of the failure to purchase health insurance, neither can it be upheld as a ‘necessary and proper’ component of the insurance re­forms. The commerce power thus does not authorize the mandate.”
  • “The Government’s tax power argument asks us to view the statute differently than we did in considering its com­merce power theory. In making its Commerce Clause argument, the Government defended the mandate as a regulation requiring individuals to purchase health in­surance. The Government does not claim that the taxing power allows Congress to issue such a command. Instead, the Government asks us to read the mandate not as order­ing individuals to buy insurance, but rather as imposing a tax on those who do not buy that product. The text of a statute can sometimes have more than one possible meaning. To take a familiar example, a law that reads ‘no vehicles in the park’ might, or might not, ban bicycles in the park. And it is well established that if a statute has two possible meanings, one of which violates the Constitution, courts should adopt the meaning that does not do so. Justice Story said that 180 years ago: ‘No court ought, unless the terms of an act rendered it una­voidable, to give a construction to it which should involve a violation, however unintentional, of the constitution.’”
  • “It is of course true that the Act describes the payment as a ‘penalty,’ not a ‘tax.’ But while that label is fatal to the application of the Anti-Injunction Act, supra, at 12–13, it does not determine whether the payment may be viewed as an exercise of Congress’s taxing power. It is up to Con­gress whether to apply the Anti-Injunction Act to any particular statute, so it makes sense to be guided by Con­gress’s choice of label on that question. That choice does not, however, control whether an exaction is within Con­gress’s constitutional power to tax.”
  • “Indeed, it is estimated that four million people each year will choose to pay the IRS rather than buy insurance. See Congressional Budget Office, supra, at 71. We would expect Congress to be troubled by that prospect if such conduct were unlawful. That Congress apparently regards such extensive failure to comply with the mandate as tolerable suggests that Congress did not think it was creating four million outlaws. It suggests instead that the shared responsibility payment merely imposes a tax citi­zens may lawfully choose to pay in lieu of buying health insurance.”
  • “The Affordable Care Act’s requirement that certain individuals pay a financial penalty for not obtaining health insurance may reasonably be characterized as a tax. Because the Constitution permits such a tax, it is not our role to forbid it, or to pass upon its wisdom or fairness.”
  • “Congress may use its spending power to cre­ate incentives for States to act in accordance with federal policies. But when ‘pressure turns into compulsion,’ ibid., the legislation runs contrary to our system of federalism.”
  • “Spending Clause programs do not pose this danger when a State has a legitimate choice whether to accept the federal condi­tions in exchange for federal funds. In such a situation, state officials can fairly be held politically accountable for choosing to accept or refuse the federal offer. But when the State has no choice, the Federal Government can achieve its objectives without accountability, just as in New York and Printz. Indeed, this danger is heightened when Congress acts under the Spending Clause, because Congress can use that power to implement federal policy it could not impose directly under its enumerated powers.”
  • “The States, however, argue that the Medicaid expansion is far from the typical case. They object that Congress has ‘crossed the line distinguishing encouragement from coercion,’ New York, supra, at 175, in the way it has struc­tured the funding: Instead of simply refusing to grant the new funds to States that will not accept the new condi­tions, Congress has also threatened to withhold those States’ existing Medicaid funds. The States claim that this threat serves no purpose other than to force unwilling States to sign up for the dramatic expansion in health care coverage effected by the Act. Given the nature of the threat and the programs at issue here, we must agree.”
  • “Nothing in our opinion precludes Congress from offering funds under the Affordable Care Act to expand the availa­bility of health care, and requiring that States accepting such funds comply with the conditions on their use. What Congress is not free to do is to penalize States that choose not to participate in that new program by taking away their existing Medicaid funding.”

Minority opinion

  • “All of us consume food, and when we do so the Federal Government can prescribe what its quality must be and even how much we must pay. But the mere fact that we all consume food and are thus, sooner or later, participants in the ‘market’ for food, does not empower the Government to say when and what we will buy. That is essentially what this Act seeks to do with respect to the purchase of health care. It exceeds federal power.”
  • “The Federal Government can address whatever problems it wants but can bring to their solution only those powers that the Constitution confers, among which is the power to regulate commerce. None of our cases say anything else. Article I contains no whatever-it-takes-to-solve-a-national­ problem power.”
  • “The issue is not whether Congress had the power to frame the minimum-coverage provision as a tax, but whether it did so. In answering that question we must, if ‘fairly possible,’ Crowell v. Benson, 285 U. S. 22, 62 (1932), construe the provision to be a tax rather than a mandate-with-penalty, since that would render it constitutional rather than unconstitutional (ut res magis valeat quam pereat). But we cannot rewrite the statute to be what it is not.”
  • “In a few cases, this Court has held that a ‘tax’ imposed upon private conduct was so onerous as to be in effect a penalty. But we have never held—never—that a penalty imposed for violation of the law was so trivial as to be in effect a tax. We have never held that any exaction imposed for violation of the law is an exercise of Congress’ taxing power—even when the statute calls it a tax, much less when (as here) the statute repeatedly calls it a penalty.”
  • “For all these reasons, to say that the Individual Man­date merely imposes a tax is not to interpret the statute but to rewrite it. Judicial tax-writing is particularly troubling. Taxes have never been popular, see, e.g., Stamp Act of 1765, and in part for that reason, the Constitution requires tax increases to originate in the House of Repre­sentatives. See Art. I, §7, cl. 1. That is to say, they must originate in the legislative body most accountable to the people, where legislators must weigh the need for the tax against the terrible price they might pay at their next election, which is never more than two years off . . . We have no doubt that Congress knew precisely what it was doing when it rejected an earlier version of this legislation that imposed a tax instead of a requirement-with-penalty . . . Impos­ing a tax through judicial legislation inverts the constitu­tional scheme, and places the power to tax in the branch of government least accountable to the citizenry.”
  • “What the Government would have us believe in these cases is that the very same textual indications that show this is not a tax under the Anti-Injunction Act show that it is a tax under the Constitution. That carries ver­bal wizardry too far, deep into the forbidden land of the sophists.”
  • “Whether federal spending legislation crosses the line from enticement to coercion is often difficult to determine, and courts should not conclude that legislation is unconstitutional on this ground unless the coercive nature of an offer is unmistakably clear. In this case, however, there can be no doubt. In structuring the ACA, Congress unambiguously signaled its belief that every State would have no real choice but to go along with the Medicaid Expansion. If the anticoercion rule does not apply in this case, then there is no such rule.”
  • “Congress’ decision to do otherwise here reflects its understanding that the ACA offer is not an ‘exceedingly generous’ gift that no State in its right mind would decline. Instead, acceptance of the offer will impose very substantial costs on participating States. It is true that the Federal Government will bear most of the initial costs associated with the Medicaid Expansion, first paying 100% of the costs of covering newly eligible individuals between 2014 and 2016. 42 U. S. C. §1396d(y). But that is just part of the picture. Participating States will be forced to shoulder substantial costs as well, because after 2019 the Federal Government will cover only 90% of the costs associated with the Expansion, see ibid., with state spending projected to increase by at least $20 billion by 2020 as a consequence. After 2019, state spending is expected to increase at a faster rate; the CBO estimates new state spending at $60 billion through 2021. Statement of Douglas W. Elmendorf, supra, at 24. And these costs may increase in the future because of the very real possibility that the Federal Government will change funding terms and reduce the percentage of funds it will cover. This would leave the States to bear an increasingly large percentage of the bill.”
  • “We should not accept the Government’s invitation to attempt to solve a constitutional problem by rewriting the Medicaid Expansion so as to allow States that reject it to retain their pre-existing Medicaid funds. Worse, the Government’s remedy, now adopted by the Court, takes the ACA and this Nation in a new direction and charts a course for federalism that the Court, not the Congress, has chosen; but under the Constitution, that power and authority do not rest with this Court.”

Additional Information
Supreme Court Ruling is a Blow to Patients, Taxpayers in Washington State
Conclusions from today’s 5-4 Supreme Court opinion
The Impact of National Health Care Reform on Washington State
Health care reform chapter from Policy Guide for Washington State (4th edition, 2012).
Washington Policy Center’s 10th Annual Health Care Conference – SeaTac, July 10.

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[Reprinted with permission from the Washington Policy Center blog; featured photo credit: wallyg]