Last June, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in King v. Burwell, shutting down the latest attack on the Affordable Care Act to reach the justices in the process. Yet while the law’s supporters — and the thousands of Americans who could die if Obamacare is repealed — celebrated this decision, another threat to the law waited in a powerful appeals court.
On Friday, however, four Republican federal appeals court judges, including at least one of the most conservative judges in the country, laid that threat to rest in an opinion signaling that federal courts will no longer give comfort to lawyers seeking to wipe out Obamacare.
More than a year ago, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit handed down its decision in Sissel v. Department of Health and Human Services. Matt Sissel and his attorneys claimed that a key provision of the Affordable Care Act must be struck down because of an alleged procedural error committed by Congress while the law was debated and passed. The three-judge panel rejected this claim, but Sissel’s attorneys responded by asking the full DC Circuit to reconsider the case. That petition, seeking full court review, languished for months without an answer from the court’s judges.
Typically, when a petition asking a full federal appeals court to hear a case — in what is known as “en banc” review — sits for months without a response from the court, it’s because a minority of the court’s active judges disagree with the three-judge panel’s decision and are drafting a dissenting opinion laying out their objections.