5th Circuit Panel Accuses Right-Wing Judge Of ‘Abuse Of Discretion’ In Obamacare Case
While it upheld the crux of a right-wing district judge’s ruling on a major Affordable Care Act case Friday, a panel of judges on the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals accused that district judge of abusing his discretion by letting insurers nationwide stop offering free preventative care.
The plaintiffs — which include some well-known ACA foes — argued that the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, or PSTF, is unconstitutional, as its members were not appointed properly. PSTF is a group of experts that makes recommendations for what qualifies as a preventive measure covered by the ACA.
Judge Reed O’Connor — a Texas district judge who’s becoming increasingly notorious for his willingness to hand down hard-right decisions (and who found the entire ACA to be unconstitutional in 2018, only to be reversed by the Supreme Court 7-2) — unsurprisingly found for the plaintiffs. But he then compounded the injury. Rather than restrict relief to the plaintiffs seeking it, he cancelled out all actions the federal government has taken to implement that part of the law since 2010 and prevented government officials from enforcing the challenged coverage requirements nationwide.
That sparked full-throated objection by the government and a flood of amici, who stressed the critical importance of keeping available services such as cancer screenings and pregnancy care. That outcry, coupled with the growing criticism of this sort of knee-jerk, nationwide relief (a favorite tactic of right-wing judges) from the Supreme Court, led the 5th Circuit panel Friday to severely narrow relief to the plaintiffs before the court.
“Because we do not find any support for the district court’s decision to vacate all agency actions taken to enforce the Task Force’s recommendations, we also cannot find any support for the district court’s universal (or nationwide) injunction,” the panel wrote. “The parties recognize that such injunctions are not ‘required or even the norm,’ and several justices on the Supreme Court have viewed them with conspicuous skepticism. Scholars and judges from our sister circuits have done the same.”
The judges also took a shot at O’Connor for his willingness to so readily turn a narrow case into one that, by the government’s lights, affects the 150 million Americans who receive free preventive care.
“We must therefore conclude that it was an abuse of discretion to enter universal injunctive relief after already providing complete relief to the plaintiffs,” the panel wrote.
The panel, consisting of two Trump appointees and one Biden one, did agree with O’Connor that the Preventive Services Task Force members are improperly serving, and must be appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate.
Still, even a Trump-appointee majority was cognizant enough of how the winds are blowing to smack down universal relief, which has become near-instinctual for a cadre of conservative judges. It’s a pattern that has attracted the attention and alarm of everyone from the Senate to the Judicial Conference to Justice Neil Gorsuch. And the more the practice comes under fire, the likelier that, eventually, something will be done to stop it — shutting down a hugely successful pipeline for right-wing litigants in the process.
Read the ruling here:
