For the tea leaf readers, which is a dangerous game when it comes to the Supreme Court, here's some fodder: the court ruled against the Trump administration in an Affordable Care Act case Monday. It's not the big ACA case, whether the law can still exist. But it's still significant, particularly since it was decided 8-1. At issue was the Obamacare "risk corridors" program, a $12 billion financial cushion that would help insurers cover losses they might suffer if they ended up covering too many expensive patients in the ACA marketplaces.
A Republican Congress, with Sen. Marco Rubio—the Florida attention hog—as ringleader, tried to withhold the fund from insurers with policy riders in 2015 and 2017 Health and Human Services spending bills. The court held, in a ruling written by Justice Sonia Sotomayor, that the relevant provision of the ACA established a money-mandating obligation, that Congress did not repeal this obligation, and that petitioners can sue the government for damages in the Court of Federal Claims. Basically, the court said that money has to be paid. "These holdings reflect a principle as old as the Nation itself: The Government should honor its obligations."
Justice Samuel Alito was the only dissenter. What this means for the big Obamacare case that's coming up—its actual constitutionality, isn't clear. This was a relatively narrow case—the Congress wrote one thing in the law and then tried to get out of it without actually repealing that provision. It's pretty straightforward law-making stuff. Under a bright light, so is the current challenge before the court, if you look at it in simple terms of congressional intent. The states—and the Trump administration—are trying to get the law overturned on the basis of Congress having zeroed out the penalty required under the individual mandate, saying that was the linchpin holding the whole law together. The Democratic attorneys general and the lawyers for the Democrats House are arguing that had Congress intended to repeal the whole of the law, it would have done so. It tried and failed and the law still stands.
It seems a little too hopeful at the moment to think that an 8-1 majority that stood up for this part of the law would stand up for the whole thing, but not necessarily a 5-4 majority. It would be hard for Chief Justice Roberts to say that congressional intent was absolutely clear in this federal obligation in this one instance, but not when it comes to the whole law. Again, this was a narrow case and shouldn't be read too expansively, but right now it's good news for Obamacare as law. That's not nothing.