The Rule of the Courts

M. Akram Faizer

Affordable Care Act of 2010, it paid no heed to the fact that the law cost the Democrats their majority in the House of Representatives and issued a decision to invalidate the ACA’s requirement that all states expand their Medicaid programs to provide health care coverage to their poorest citizens. 103 The decision undermined the Administration’s goal of finally providing universal health care coverage to all Americans that would have finally granted universal health care coverage to all Americans, 104 In 2013, the Court used its judicial review powers to invalidate the most important provision of the reauthorized Voting Rights Act of 1965 (“VRA”), which finally gave political rights to racial minority Americans a full century after the Fourteenth Amendment’s enactment. 105 The Court disregarded evidence of voter suppression techniques disproportionately used in the American South, such as onerous voter identification requirements for ballot access and racial gerrymandering of legislative districts, to conclude the that the VRA’s coverage formula for determining the states needed to obtain federal preclearance for voting procedure change approval, was unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment. 106 This is because the coverage formula consisted almost entirely of Southern states where ballot access discrepancies between whites and Blacks had marked improved compared to other states. 107 The Court subsequently reversed nearly sixty years of prior precedent to conclude that partisan gerrymandering of legislative districts that tend to predetermine election outcomes are nonjus ticiable political questions and therefore not to be reviewed by the federal courts. 108 The Court’s development of Major Questions Doctrine (“MQD”) as a methodical approach to evaluating the legality of administrative agency rules and policies by requiring agencies to demonstrate that Congress

103 Nat’l Fed’n of Indep. Bus. v. Sebelius, 567 U.S. 519 (2012). 104 Id.

105 Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. 529 (2013). 106 Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. 529 (2013). 107 Shelby County v. Holder, 570 U.S. 529 (2013). 108 Rucho v. Common Cause, 588 U.S. 684 (2019).

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