Dang Van Phuoc / AP
The Road to Hill 10
A veteran's return to Vietnam
William Broyles
February 1985 June 1985
Alan Diaz / AP
Rise of the Know-Nothing Judge
Nicholas Bagley
The Fifth Circuit may be poised to accept a ridiculous argument against the Affordable Care Act.
If you've heard anything about the Texas lawsuit seeking to blow up the Affordable Care Act, you've heard that it involves yet another constitutional challenge to the individual mandate. That's true—but it's also profoundly misleading.
The parties in Texas v. United States don't actually disagree about what the Constitution means. What they're fighting about, instead, is what Congress meant to do, in late 2017, when it wiped out the tax penalty for going without coverage. At the time, President Donald Trump crowed, "The very unfair and unpopular Individual Mandate has been terminated as part of our Tax Cut Bill." Congressional Republicans said the same.
In the lawsuit, however, the Trump administration is singing a different tune. Together with a group of red states, it now claims that Congress didn't really end the mandate when it removed the penalty. Instead, it says that Congress kept the mandate and made it even more coercive—and thus unconstitutional. Trump & Co. would also have you believe that if the (now zero-dollar) mandate is unconstitutional, so is the entire Affordable Care Act.
The Horrors of ICE's 'Trans Pod'
A woman who spent two months in solitary confinement in a "transgender pod" tells her story.