Some of Obamacare’s loudest critics are now defending the law in court
By Paige Winfield Cunningham, Washington Post, June 15
For once, Obamacare is bringing people together instead of dividing them. Believe it or not, five prominent scholars who have been sharply divided over past courtroom kerfuffles over the Affordable Care Act are uniting in opposition to the health-care law’s latest challenge.
Their argument, detailed in a friend-of-the-court brief filed yesterday, represents an usual alliance among liberal, conservative and libertarian legal minds — and could signify President Trump’s administration is going out on a shaky limb by refusing to defend the ACA in court.
The five include Jonathan Adler and Ilya Somin — two libertarian-minded professors at Case Western Reserve University and George Mason University who both argued the ACA’s individual mandate to buy insurance is unconstitutional when the Supreme Court considered that question back in 2012.
Kevin Walsh, a conservative who teaches law at the University of Richmond, has also signed on. While he agreed with the reasoning Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. used to uphold the mandate, he sided against ACA subsidies in the later King v. Burwell case. Walsh is known as a prominent expert on what’s known as “severability doctrine,” which outlines when a court must strike down a law because it has found one piece of it to be unconstitutional. more