precedent
Ruling striking down the Affordable Care Act
<p>What does Friday's ruling mean? I thought the Supreme Court already upheld the individual mandate and most aspects of the law. </p>

<p>As pointed out in <a href="https://www.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.txnd.299449/gov.uscourts.txnd.299449.211.0.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">the ruling</a>, the earlier Supreme Court ruling in <a href="https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/567/519/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">NFIB v. Sebelius</a>, 567 U.S. 519, was handed down prior to passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017. One provision of that act was to reduce the ACA shared responsibility payment to zero. It was crucial to the earlier ruling that Congress has the power to tax: it is not within the scope of the Interstate Commerce powers (this was part of the holding in that case). Since there is now no tax, there is no tax-based authority to impose this obligation. What it "means" is that this ruling will be appealed and presumably the argument will continue to the 5th Circuit, ultimately to the Supreme Court. At this point, one can only speculate about the final outcome.</p>
