
The U.S. Supreme Court today largely upheld the Affordable Care Act, President Obama’s signature health care law, as predicted by University of Notre Dame Associate Dean and Law Professor Richard W. Garnett, a past clerk to former Chief Justice William Rehnquist and an expert on constitutional-law and religious-freedom matters.
The court decided that the “individual mandate,” which requires Americans to either purchase health insurance or pay a fine, effectively functions as a tax and is therefore constitutionally permissible.
“While the individual mandate survived its constitutional challenges, the sweeping assertions of regulatory power made by many of the act’s supporters did not,” Garnett says. “As the chief justice wrote, ‘the framers created a federal government of limited powers and assigned to this court the duty of enforcing those limits. The court does so today.’ Read More