Texas and other states who brought the lawsuit assert that because Congress in 2017 zeroed out the tax penalty for violating Obamacare’s individual mandate to buy insurance, the provision is no longer constitutional, and that the rest of the law is “inseverable” from it and “therefore invalid.”
In the filing with the Fifth Circuit dated Monday, the Justice Department wrote that it had “determined that the district court’s judgment should be affirmed. Because the United States is not urging that any portion of the district court’s judgment be reversed, the government intends to file a brief on the appellees’ schedule.”
The Justice Department filing came just as Trump was taking a victory lap after Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s probe didn’t find evidence that the president’s campaign conspired with Russians to manipulate the 2016 election, according to a summary of the report by Attorney General William Barr.
This article provided by Bloomberg News.