On May 1, 2019, the Department of Justice (“DOJ”) filed an initial brief (the “Brief”) with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit (the “Fifth Circuit”) on behalf of the United States, in favor of upholding the lower court’s decision that found the entire Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (the “ACA”) unconstitutional.

As we discussed previously in our December 2018 blog post, a federal district court judge in Texas struck down the entire ACA by ruling that the “individual mandate,” which was reduced to $0 as part of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, no longer raises revenue and thus is no longer a constitutional exercise of Congress’s taxing power. The judge went on to determine that the unconstitutional individual mandate was inseverable from the rest of the ACA and therefore, the entire ACA was unconstitutional. The decision was then appealed to the Fifth Circuit.