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Page Number: 55.0

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CALIFORNIA v. TEXAS 

ALITO, J., dissenting 

rating requirements disappear.  Those costs have obviously
been shifted to others—in all likelihood to individuals who 
now pay higher premiums or face higher deductibles or to
the taxpayers.  This shift fundamentally changed the oper-
ation of the scheme Congress adopted. 

The repeal of the tax or penalty also provides no reason
to  doubt  our  previous  conclusion  about  Congress’s  intent.
While the 2017 Act repealed the tax or penalty, it did not 
alter  the  statutory  finding  noted  above,  and the  2017  Act 
cannot plausibly be viewed as the  manifestation of a con-
gressional intent to preserve the ACA in altered form.  The 
2017  Act  would  not  have  passed  the  House  without  the 
votes of the Members who had voted to scrap the ACA just 
a few months earlier,10 and the repeal of the tax or penalty,
which they obviously found particularly offensive, was their 
fallback option.  They eliminated the tax or penalty and left 
the chips to fall as they might.  Thus, under the reasoning 
of  the  NFIB  dissent,  the  provisions  burdening  the  States
are inseverable from the individual mandate. 

The same result follows under the new approach to ques-
tions  of  partial  unconstitutionality  that  some  Members of 
the Court have adopted in the years since NFIB.  They have 
suggested  the  severability  analysis  should  track  ordinary 
rules of statutory interpretation.  Seila Law, 591 U. S., at 
___, ___–___ (THOMAS, J., concurring in part and dissenting
in part) (slip op., at 16, 20–21).  In their view, Congress de-
cides whether the provisions it enacts are linked to one an-
other  or  not,  and  the  answer  lies  in  the  ordinary  tools  of 
statutory construction.  And everything the NFIB dissent-
ers  said  points  to  the  same  conclusion  as  a  matter  of  the
ACA’s text, history, and structure.  The relevant provisions
were  passed  as  a  comprehensive  exercise  of  Congress’s 

—————— 

10 Compare 163 Cong. Rec. H4171 (May 4, 2017) (passage of the Amer-
ican Health Care Act, H. R. 1628), with id., at H10312 (Dec. 20, 2017) 
(passage of the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, H. R. 1).