Trump Declares War on “Puppetmaster” Obama After Capitol Destroyed

Good evening, America. We turn our attention to West Palm Beach, Florida, where former President Donald Trump took the stage and spoke on a myriad of issues facing our great republic. Not one to shy away from making headlines, Trump addressed one glaring issue that, to many, signifies the declining pride in our republic - the deteriorating state of the US Capitol.

The ‘Conservative’ Supreme Court’s Love-Affair With Obamacare

Giving the Left’s healthcare scam a thumbs-up.

BY MATTHEW VADUM

SEE: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2021/06/why-does-conservative-supreme-court-love-obamacare-matthew-vadum/;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

Conservatives across America have to be asking themselves why they put so much time, money, and energy into electing Republicans when the supposedly conservative Supreme Court justices who follow side with the Left in important cases.

The latest jurisprudential atrocity is the high court’s dreadful but not altogether unexpected betrayal of the U.S. Constitution in California v. Texas, a challenge to the Obamacare redistribution statute lodged by Texas and 17 other states that had been backed by the former Trump administration.

“It’s never been a proper role for the federal government to regulate health care and health insurance,” Robert Henneke of the Texas Public Policy Foundation, who represented two individual plaintiffs, said after winning at the trial court level. “It is a proper role for the states.”

There are 6 conservative justices and 3 liberal justices on the Supreme Court, or so the conventional wisdom goes.

Yet instead of dealing with the legal controversy head-on, a majority of the court chickened out, failing for a third time to mete out a richly deserved death blow to the flagrantly unconstitutional, un-American monstrosity that is the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA). By a vote of 7–2 on June 17, the Supreme Court cavalierly brushed aside questions of the law’s constitutional validity by finding that those challenging it lacked the required legal standing to do so.

Of the three Trump appointees, two –Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett— voted to protect the ACA. Even the most brilliant member of the court, conservative stalwart Justice Clarence Thomas, bought into this cowardly nonsense, siding with the majority on standing.

This ruling should disabuse Americans once and for all of the claim, repeated ad nauseam by the Left, that the Supreme Court, which momentarily is dominated by Republican appointees, is somehow “conservative” or “right-wing.”

It also demonstrates that threatening to pack the court, as Democrats vow to do, is an effective way of making sure the court fails to do its job.

After all, the Supreme Court does what it wants to do. In controversial cases, it sometimes adheres to the Constitution, as its members are sworn to do; other times it just makes stuff up, issuing incoherent decisions written to justify a predetermined conclusion. Invoking standing is a tried and true method of copping out.

After the court opinion in California v. Texas was released, Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said what needed to be said.

“Obamacare was sold on a lie to the American people,” the Republican wrote on Twitter

“Its crown jewel —the individual mandate— was unconstitutional when it was enacted and it is still unconstitutional. Yet, seven justices decided to avoid the question of constitutionality by limiting their decision to a ruling on standing. If the government is allowed to mislead its citizens, pass a massive government takeover of health care, and yet still survive after Supreme Court review, this spells doom for the principles of federalism and limited government.”

“The failed Obamacare system will stagger on as a result of this decision,” said Sen. John Barrasso (R-Wyo.), a physician who has worked to repeal the law. “Every American’s health care has been harmed by Obamacare.”

Recall that in the 2008 campaign, then-candidate Barack Hussein Obama lied to voters, claiming that his health care scheme would drive annual premiums down by $2,500 and that patients would not see their health care arrangements disrupted. Even left-leaning PolitiFact deemed Obama’s mantra, “If you like your health care plan, you can keep it,” its “Lie of the Year” in 2013.

After BHO conned his way into the Oval Office, the law was enacted in 2010 without a single Republican vote in Congress on final passage. Later, Obamacare “architect” and MIT economist Jonathan Gruber said lying was essential to getting it done. It was “the stupidity of the American voter” that made it important to conceal Obamacare’s true costs from the public. “That was really, really critical for the thing to pass,” he said.

Insurance premiums have shot up since then. The Kaiser Family Foundation reports that the total cost of the average employer-sponsored family health insurance premium increased to $20,576 in 2019, up from $13,375 in 2009, a 54 percent increase. In individual markets, premiums rose from an average of $2,640 ($220 per month) in 2011 to $6,960 ($580 per month) in 2019, a 164 percent increase. Many consumers haven’t been able to afford premiums and have lost their insurance.

Finally, the case of California v. Texas came along, affording the Supreme Court a wonderful opportunity to at long last drive a stake through Obamacare’s heart.

Congress teed up the case by making the ACA’s individual mandate disappear in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 by reducing the tax penalty for not purchasing insurance to zero. Those fighting the statute in the current case argued that the revised law ran afoul of the Constitution because the individual mandate was so integral to the law that Obamacare couldn’t function without it.

At the end of 2018, Texas-based federal Judge Reed O’Connor sided with the challengers, ruling they had standing and that the Obamacare law was unconstitutional in its entirety.

In 2017, Congress “sawed off the last leg [Obamacare] stood on,” wrote O’Connor, who was appointed by President George W. Bush. The “mandate ‘is essential to’ and inseverable from ‘the other provisions of’” the law, he wrote.

But the Supreme Court had no interest in doing the right thing.

The majority opinion in California v. Texas was written by liberal Justice Stephen Breyer, though it reads like something written by the weaselly virtue-signaling fake conservative Chief Justice John Roberts. Roberts, along with conservative Justices Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett, joined the majority opinion. Naturally, liberal Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan also joined it.

Roberts, who wrote the NFIB v. Sebelius decision, had said during oral arguments November 10, 2020, that the Supreme Court had no business striking down unconstitutional statutes.

“On the severance question, I think it’s hard for you to argue that Congress intended the entire Act to fall if the mandate were struck down when the same Congress that lowered the penalty to zero did not even try to repeal the rest of the Act,” Roberts told Texas Solicitor General Kyle D. Hawkins.

“I think, frankly, that they wanted the Court to do that. But that’s not our job,” Roberts said in an assertion that would no doubt surprise his predecessor John Marshall, who invented judicial review in 1803 in the seminal Marbury v. Madison ruling.

Roberts was in fact wrong when he said Congress did not try to repeal the Obamacare law. The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act that zeroed out the mandate-related penalty came out of the 115th Congress (2017–2018). In fact, lawmakers voted on several bills in that Congress that would have repealed Obamacare.

Returning to the case at hand, Breyer wrote that the 18 states argued that without the penalty the law’s “minimum essential coverage requirement,” as he put it in pleasant-sounding language, was unconstitutional.

They said “neither the Commerce Clause nor the Tax Clause (nor any other enumerated power) grants Congress the power to enact it,” Breyer wrote. “They also argue that the minimum essential coverage requirement is not severable from the rest of the Act. Hence, they believe the Act as a whole is invalid.”

Then Breyer began the excuse-making.

But the Supreme Court does “not reach these questions of the Act’s validity” because “Texas and the other plaintiffs in this suit lack the standing necessary to raise them.”

Article III of the Constitution “gives federal courts the power to adjudicate only genuine ‘Cases’ and ‘Controversies[,]’ … [and] includes the requirement that litigants have standing,” Breyer wrote.

A “plaintiff has standing only if he can ‘allege personal injury fairly traceable to the defendant’s allegedly unlawful conduct and likely to be redressed by the requested relief.’”

Citing two precedents, he stated fatuously that, “Neither the individual nor the state plaintiffs have shown that the injury they will suffer or have suffered is ‘fairly traceable’ to the ‘allegedly unlawful conduct’ of which they complain.”

Come again?

Another way of putting this is to say that the Supreme Court didn’t care about the needless hardship and suffering Obamacare has imposed on Americans without controlling costs, which keep rising and rising.

The court lacked the resolve to do the right thing and actually interpret the Constitution, so, as it has done many times before, the court chose the result it wanted and then after the fact threw together yet another poorly reasoned written opinion to justify the desired outcome.

“Standing, after all, is not a complicated concept,” Andrea Widburg wrote at American Thinker, citing Whitmore v. Arkansas (1990).

It requires a litigant to clearly demonstrate he has suffered an “injury in fact,” which “must be concrete in both a qualitative and temporal sense.” The litigant must allege an injury to himself that is “distinct and palpable,” not merely “abstract … and the alleged harm must be actual or imminent, not ‘conjectural’ or ‘hypothetical.’” The litigant must also show the injury “fairly can be traced to the challenged action” and “is likely to be redressed by a favorable decision.”

So what would it take to demonstrate an “injury in fact”? Surging health care cost-related bankruptcies? Reduced hiring by employers because health insurance is unaffordable? An increase in morbidity rates because patients can’t afford to go to the doctor? Rising suicide rates resulting from sick patients killing themselves because they can’t get the care they need?Dead bodies overflowing from morgues?

If the Supreme Court doesn’t want to rule on the merits of a case, the standing excuse is an easy out.

Justice Samuel Alito used sarcasm to slam his colleagues for engaging in legal sophistry because they didn’t want to do the right thing.

“Today’s decision is the third installment in our epic Affordable Care Act trilogy, and it follows the same pattern as installments one and two,” Alito wrote in a dissenting opinion that was joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch.

“In all three episodes, with the Affordable Care Act facing a serious threat, the Court has pulled off an improbable rescue.”

Let’s go over the other two constituent parts of the trilogy.

In NFIB v. Sebelius (2012), the Supreme Court upheld the statute 5–4, on the theory that the individual mandate—which compelled Americans to buy health insurance even if they didn’t want it—was somehow a valid exercise of Congress’s power to tax.

The court again threw a lifeline to Obamacare in King v. Burwell(2015), finding 6–3 that even though the law provides that Congress makes tax credits available only on an “Exchange established by the State,” the latter phrase actually means on an “Exchange established by the State or the Federal Government,” as the justifiably angry late Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in his dissenting opinion.

In his dissent in California v. Texas, Alito wrote, “No one can fail to be impressed by the lengths to which this Court has been willing to go to defend the ACA against all threats.”

“A penalty is a tax. The United States is a State. And 18 States who bear costly burdens under the ACA cannot even get a foot in the door to raise a constitutional challenge. So a tax that does not tax is allowed to stand and support one of the biggest Government programs in our Nation’s history. Fans of judicial inventiveness will applaud once again. But I must respectfully dissent.”

Perhaps Justice Thomas’s conscience bothered him so instead of doing the right thing he slammed his colleagues for wrongly deciding NFIB v. Sebelius and King v. Burwell.

“But, whatever the Act’s dubious history in this Court, we must assess the current suit on its own terms. And, here, there is a fundamental problem with the arguments advanced by the plaintiffs in attacking the Act—they have not identified any unlawful action that has injured them,” he wrote in an opinion concurring with the majority.

Tedious stuff.

And although Gorsuch may have done the right thing in this case, his brief tenure on the court does not inspire confidence.

With Gorsuch’s majority opinion last year in the 6-3 decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, the justice used the court as a national super-legislature and amended a law without involving actually elected lawmakers. (Roberts was the only other conservative in the majority.) Gorsuch stretched the meaning of the word “sex” in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to include sexual orientation and gender identity, something nobody thought it meant in 1964. As then-Solicitor General Noel Francisco said during oral arguments, “Sex means whether you’re male or female, not whether you’re gay or straight.”

“Many will applaud today’s decision because they agree on policy grounds with the Court’s updating of Title VII,” Alito wrote in a dissenting opinion.

“But the question in these cases is not whether discrimination because of sexual orientation or gender identity should be outlawed. The question is whether Congress did that in 1964. It indisputably did not.”

But I digress, sort of.

Over the past year the Supreme Court has left the American people at the mercy of radical leftists. 

Power-mad governors and mayors inspired by swamp creature Anthony Fauci and fed bogus data by lying, monomaniacal epidemiologists, declared war on the American people as they combated the Chinese virus that causes COVID-19. 

The Supreme Court stood by for the most part and allowed the Left’s ongoing experiment in social control to proceed unimpeded. Ditto for the election-related challenges brought by President Donald Trump and Republicans, which seem more and more justified with each passing day as post-election audits and investigations continue.

There was so much justice to be done, but the Supreme Court refused to do it.

As it turns out, what seemed true before the ruling has only come into sharper focus after it: good, patriotic people who believe in the American idea cannot count on the Supreme Court, which has long enjoyed reverence it does not deserve, to save America.

We will have to do it ourselves.

Biden’s ‘American Recovery Act’ Includes Hidden 150% Obamacare Expansion

Missing from the released pandemic relief summary, the expansion of Obamacare is proposed at the end a 90-page legislative proposal

BY FRANK SALVATO-NATIONAL FILE

SEE: https://www.infowars.com/posts/bidens-american-recovery-act-includes-hidden-150-obamacare-expansion/;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

Any mention of a temporary expansion that breathes life back into Obamacare was mysteriously missing from a summary of the House Democrat pandemic relief stimulus proposal released to the public by House Ways & Means Committee Chairman US Rep. Richard Neal (D-MA), Monday. But it’s there.

Tucked away at the end of the $1.9 trillion 90-page legislative proposal is verbiage that outlines the first expansion of Obamacare in more than a decade.

One of the two proposals held in the proposed legislation would fully subsidize Affordable Care Act (ACA) coverage for people who earn up to 150 percent of the federal poverty level.

The new Obamacare eligibility table now incorporates people making more than 400 percent of the federal poverty level. That table affords subsidies for first time application, capping their total premium costs at 8.5 percent of their income.

Another proposal included in the legislation would cover 85 percent of a person’s health insurance premiums for those laid-off during the pandemic utilizing COBRA, access to their employer-based health insurance.

“Our nation is struggling, the virus is still not contained, and the American people are counting on Congress to meet this moment with bold, immediate action,” Neal said in a statement. “From increasing direct assistance to those who need it most to expanding tax credits for low- and middle-income workers, we deliver substantial solutions in this package.”

Neal’s legislation proposals are written as budget reconciliation measures, which means House Democrats can pass them with a simple majority. They would need no support from Republicans in that chamber.

The nine proposals outlined in Neal’s legislative outline make up roughly half of the $1.9 trillion package offered by Democrats. The package includes the $1,400 direct payments to Americans.

President Biden signed an executive order last month ordering the reopening of Obamacare’s online health insurance marketplaces. People seeking health insurance under the law will be offered the chance in a few weeks.

The Bidens Got Into the “Financially Struggling” Hospital Business and People Died~At Least 3 Hospitals Became the “Money pit” for them

There wasn’t enough money for medication, tests, or sterilizing instruments, but lots of money for the Bidens.

"THE BEST OF CARE" BEFORE THE BIDENS GOT THEIR HANDS ON TONS OF MONEY

BY DANIEL GREENFIELD

SEE: https://www.frontpagemag.com/fpm/2020/10/bidens-got-hospital-business-and-people-died-daniel-greenfield/;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is an investigative journalist and writer focusing on the radical Left and Islamic terrorism.

The old slogan, "The Best of Care" can still be found on Ellwood City Medical Center's old promotional materials. When the pandemic began, the old rural Rust Belt country where President Trump beat Hillary Clinton could have used a hospital. Any hospital.

There was even talk of reopening the defunct hospital again to treat coronavirus patients.

But, like so much in Pennsylvania, the Ellwood City Medical Center never recovered from the Democrats. The FBI raided it in January and the hospital lost its license next month. Not that it mattered at that point because the hospital had already been shut down since December.

Despite that, the hospital managed to score $1.8 million in coronavirus relief funds.

With no hospital, local residents face a trip if they’re injured. And if the injury is bad enough, they might not survive. The closed hospital in Pennsylvania is just another piece of the Biden legacy.

In the three years since Americore CEO Grant White was allegedly introduced by James Biden to Joe Biden at a fundraiser for the Beau Biden Foundation, a charity co-chaired by Hunter Biden whose laptop bearing the foundation's sticker is at the center of a new scandal, there have been lawsuits, an FBI raid, and investigations in different cities and states.

“James Biden mentioned that his brother’s connections to labor unions and the Department of Veterans Affairs would help DMM expand its model nationwide,” a lawsuit filed by one company claims.

Mayor Anthony Court, a Democrat, recalls White constantly dropping Biden's name.

White would later claim that Biden told him, "there’s not a single door in the country that we can’t open."

James Biden, Joe’s brother, had become a principal at Americore whose business model was based on buying and turning around rural hospitals. But the turnaround was into the grave.

Obamacare had hit rural hospitals hard, forcing many of them to shut down. By Obama’s last year in office, 4% of rural hospitals had closed down, and hundreds more were on the brink. And the Bidens had figured out a way to profit from the devastation caused by Obama-Biden.

"His brother was very interested in rural health care and very interested in veterans’ health care, and it was something he really wanted to get behind," an Americore executive recalled Biden telling him. "This would help his brother get elected."

After Americore took over the Ellwood City Medical Center, it racked up over 40 citations from the Department of Health. Cardiovascular services were cut, the wound unit was closed, and access to its MRI machines was sidelined.

In 2018, James Biden was renovating his Americore office and demanding expensive furniture as part of an office that was described as a “little shrine to him and his brother and Obama.”

Utilities threatened to turn off the gas and the water at Ellwood. Instruments weren’t being sterilized because there was no equipment, and the hospital couldn’t even afford to order tests.

Things got so bad at the hospital that hazardous waste was just piling up in garbage bags.

Hospital patients might have been able to get basic care and supplies, but the money wasn’t there. Meanwhile, James Biden had allegedly made off with $650,000.

According to the Americore CEO, “Jim Biden directed me to loan him approximately $400,000 of this money for him to use to repay a past-due personal loan.”

Later, "Biden took additional amounts totaling approximately $250,000."

That was in January 2018. By the summer, Ellwood was closing departments, and by the fall, it couldn’t pay its power or gas bill. Meanwhile, Biden only allegedly paid back $25,000.

James Biden had promised that the money would be coming from the Muslim world.

Biden and his partners had allegedly gone to the Qatar Investment Authority, the Islamic terror state that acts as the patron for the Muslim Brotherhood, controls Al Jazeera, whose royal family had ties to the mastermind of 9/11, and which is allied with Iran, for money for Americore.

But Qatar didn’t pay up and James Biden and his partners denied ever taking the meeting. The Americore CEO claims he was told that President Trump’s sanctions on Iran blocked the deal.

The former Americore CEO also claims to have met with Hunter and James Biden at a meeting that looked for ways to raise money from China.

“We've got people all around the world who want to invest in Joe Biden,” James Biden had once boasted. There’s no denying that. How else could a college dropout and failed nightclub owner be in demand around the world, or help score a billion dollar contract to build homes in Iraq?

Together James and Hunter Biden had built a business around Joe Biden. But what happened in Pennsylvania, in St. Louis, and Arkansas ended with more than greed.

St. Alexius Hospital in St. Louis had become famous as the scene of a forties exorcism that had inspired the novel and the movie, The Exorcist, but there was no one to exorcise the Bidens.

The famous hospital is another of the failed Americore properties and as it crawled agonizingly through bankruptcy, "two preventable deaths" were among the casualties. Like Ellwood, St. Alexius had to cut patient care, sacrificing its operating room, and its wound care clinic.

The hospital’s nursing school shut down and the facility was down to four contracted nurses and was operating at a fraction of its capacity.

The victims of the disaster were the largely black residents of the south St. Louis neighborhood.

St. Alexius, which began as a Catholic hospital in 1828, is now being used to house the homeless, and its bankruptcy sale has been stalled because of a state investigation triggered by an “immediate patient jeopardy” tag.

In Izard County, Arkansas, the only hospital in the county, listed as a critical access hospital, is also on the chopping block.

"We have difficulty in securing pharmaceuticals simply because of lack of money," a doctor at the hospital warned.

Last year, two medical firms sued, among others, James Biden, claiming that, "millions of dollars in funds may have been taken by these defendants outside of the ordinary course of business."

One of the men claimed that James Biden had promised to sell the plan to the White House. Instead Biden accidentally texted him a plan to defraud him even as Biden's partner was encouraging him to make up numbers to defraud a Turkish company.

Another partner was promised that their “model would be used by Joe Biden as part of his campaign.”

The “investment capital originating from and flowing through foreign entities” did not materialize, neither did Biden’s alleged promise that the company’s model “would play an integral role in health care policy at the highest levels of the United States government.”

When there were concerns about the government, the message was, “Jim told me. Don’t worry every time someone threatens to sue you you’re with us now nobody is gonna touch You,”

After they sued Biden and his partners, they received an envelope filled with "blood-stained currency from a Middle Eastern country" linked to terrorists and a "torture ticket" resulting in an FBI investigation.

But the real price is being paid in Ellwood City, in St. Louis, and Izard County.

Joe Biden has run on a promise to tackle the pandemic. But when coronavirus cases shot up 40% in Lawrence County over the summer, the Ellwood City Medical Center wasn’t there.

New cases have been rising sharply in Izard County and in St. Louis, there is one hospital less able to help and treat the sick.

“All the promises were on the Biden name,” one of the men James Biden dealt with said.

James Biden has moved on and as his brother aspires to the White House, has no doubt found new investors who “who want to invest in Joe Biden”, but in a place without a hospital, no one can move on. And when Election Day comes to Pennsylvania, that’s one place Biden won’t win.

The next time Joe Biden promises to fix healthcare, he can start in Ellwood City.

 

TRUMP HHS ENDS OBAMACARE RULE THAT INCLUDED ABORTION UNDER “HEALTHCARE”

BY WARREN MASS

SEE: https://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/health-care/item/36371-trump-hhs-ends-obamacare-rule-that-included-abortion-under-healthcare;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

The Trump administration’s Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has issued a statement about ending a definition issued by the Obama administration regarding Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act (ACA or “ObamaCare”). The Obama administration had redefined sex discrimination to include termination of pregnancy (abortion) and gender identity, which it defined as “one’s internal sense of gender, which may be male, female, neither, or a combination of male and female.”

Under the revised HHS rules, abortion and “gender identity” will no longer be protected under anti-discrimination laws. Though the Obama-era rules have not been put into practice since the last day of 2016, they were still on the books. With the latest HHS ruling, they are now erased.

The Obama administration rules, issued in 2016, could have forced medical workers to help abort unborn babies. It also would have protected so-called transgender individuals from sex discrimination based on their “identify” rather than the traditional biological definition of gender as determined at birth.

Roger Severino, director of the Office for Civil Rights at HHS, has reassured the public that the changes will not affect the agency’s protections: “HHS respects the dignity of every human being, and as we have shown in our response to the pandemic, we vigorously protect and enforce the civil rights of all to the fullest extent permitted by our laws as passed by Congress. We are unwavering in our commitment to enforcing civil rights in healthcare.” 

The Obama administration, however, decided to add its own definitions to certain federal statutes, such as Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 (Title IX) stating that it wanted to prohibit discrimination on the basis of sex in certain federally funded programs.

However, noted the HHS release, on December 31, 2016, a federal court enjoined the Obama administration’s attempt to redefine sex discrimination in its 2016 rule. The court concluded that the administration’s provisions were likely contrary to applicable civil rights law, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and the Administrative Procedure Act. On October 15, 2019, the federal court issued a final judgment, and vacated and remanded these provisions as unlawful.

HHS noted that this final ruling is binding on HHS, which has not been able to enforce these provisions since December 2016, and the provisions have been vacated since October 2019.

Therefore, HHS has eliminated certain provisions of the 2016 Rule that exceeded the scope of the authority delegated by Congress in Section 1557. HHS will enforce Section 1557 by returning to the government’s interpretation of sex discrimination according to the plain meaning of the word “sex” as male or female and as determined by biology. The 2016 Rule declined to recognize “sexual orientation” as a protected category under the ACA, and HHS will abide by that judgment.

 

 

SUPREME COURT SETS STAGE FOR FULL REVIEW OF OBAMACARE

BY BOB ADELMANN

SEE: https://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/constitution/item/36309-supreme-court-sets-stage-for-full-on-review-of-obamacare;

republished below in full unedited for informational, educational & research purposes:

Two rulings by the Supreme Court on Wednesday not only affirm the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, they also hearten pro-life constitutional conservatives who hope the rulings set the stage for a full review of the constitutionality of ObamaCare (aka the Affordable Care Act, or ACA) by the high court in the fall.

The first ruling, in a 7-2 decision, concerned the Little Sisters of the Poor, and finally puts to rest the question whether the Trump administration, through an Executive Order to the Department of Health and Human Services, could expand the exemption under which faith-based ministries such as the  Little Sisters could avoid having to provide contraceptive health services to their employees.

When ObamaCare was first foisted upon the American citizenry in 2010, it specifically exempted churches from providing contraceptive healthcare coverage but said nothing about faith-based ministries. So, under ObamaCare, the HHS ruled that religious non-profits such as the Little Sisters of the Poor had to comply, or suffer the consequences of huge fines.

During President Trump’s first year in office, he ordered the HHS to issue a new rule expanding the exemption. Several states sued, claiming that Trump had overreached. The opinion of the high court was penned by Justice Clarence Thomas, who wrote, “Consistent with their Catholic faith, the Little Sisters hold the religious conviction ‘that deliberately avoiding reproduction through medical means is immoral.’”

He explained why the court reversed a lower court’s ruling, stating that the Trump administration had not exceeded its authority by issuing the new rule that expanded the exemption:

For over 150 years, the Little Sisters have engaged in faithful service and sacrifice, motivated by a religious calling to surrender all for the sake of their brother. “[T]hey commit to constantly living out a witness that proclaims the unique, inviolable dignity of every person, particularly those whom others regard as weak or worthless.”

But for the past seven years, they — like many other religious objectors who have participated in the litigation and rulemakings leading up to today’s decision — have had to fight for the ability to continue in their noble work without violating their sincerely held religious beliefs.

After two decisions from this Court and multiple failed regulatory attempts, the Federal Government has arrived at a solution that exempts the Little Sisters from the source of their complicity-based concerns — the administratively imposed contraceptive mandate.

We hold today that the Departments had the statutory authority to craft that exemption, as well as the contemporaneously issued moral exemption.

We further hold that the rules promulgating these exemptions are free from procedural defects. Therefore, we reverse the judgment of the Court of Appeals.

The second case, Our Lady of Guadalupe School v. Morissey-Berru, although less known, is just as important as Little Sisters. The Supreme Court also ruled 7-2 in favor of the two religious schools who argued that they should not have to face discrimination lawsuits brought by former teachers.

Justice Samuel Alito wrote the majority opinion:

The religious education and formation of students is the very reason for the existence of most private religious schools, and therefore the selection and supervision of the teachers upon whom the schools rely to do this work lie at the core of their mission.

Judicial review of the way in which religious schools discharge those responsibilities would undermine the independence of religious institutions in a way that the First Amendment does not tolerate.

Applause for the ruling came from Adrian Alarcon, spokesman for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles: “Religious schools play an integral role in passing the faith to the next generation of believers. We are grateful that the Supreme Court recognized [that] faith groups must be free to make their own decisions about who should be entrusted with these essential duties.”

The lead counsel for Becket, Eric Rassbach, who argued the case for the schools, called the decision a “huge win”:

Today is a huge win for religious schools of all faith traditions. The last thing government officials should do is decide who is authorized to teach Catholicism to Catholics or Judaism to Jews. We are glad the court has resoundingly reaffirmed that churches and synagogues, not government, control who teaches kids about God.

In the fall, the high court will take on a lawsuit brought by 20 states, led by Texas, calling for the elimination of ObamaCare. It will be combined with another lawsuit brought by 17 other states, led by California, seeking to preserve the law.

The Trump administration has weighed in on the side of the 20 states, filing a brief that asks the high court to consider “whether, as a result of the elimination of the monetary penalty for noncompliance with the ACA’s minimum-essential-coverage requirement … that requirement is no longer a valid exercise of Congress’ legislative authority.” And if so, “the remainder of the ACA’s provisions are inseverable from it.”

Therefore, according to the government’s brief, “the judgment of the court of appeals should be affirmed insofar as it held that the individual mandate is unconstitutional, and this Court should further hold that the insurance provisions injuring the individual plaintiffs are inseverable from the mandate and the remainder of the Act.”

Naturally, totalitarians fear the worst. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi issued a statement: “President Trump and the Republicans’ campaign to rip away the protections and benefits of the Affordable Care Act in the middle of the coronavirus crisis is an act of unfathomable cruelty.” Former Vice President Joe Biden spoke, denouncing Trump’s position: “It’s cruel, it’s heartless, and it’s callous.”

Constitutionalists are hoping that the high court finds ObamaCare unconstitutional.