Opinion ID: 2427342
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 2

Heading: does this court have jurisdiction over plaintiffs' claim?

Text: Our first duty is to determine whether this is a case or controversy within the meaning of Article III of the Constitution such that we have judicial power to review this issue. Nat'l Rifle Ass'n of Am. v. Magaw, 132 F.3d 272, 279 (6th Cir.1997). We review issues of justiciability pursuant to Article III de novo.  Id. at 278. Standing requires plaintiffs to demonstrate actual present harm or a significant possibility of future harm. Id. at 279. [T]he presence of one party with standing is sufficient to satisfy Article III's case-or-controversy requirement. Rumsfeld v. Forum for Academic & Institutional Rights, Inc., 547 U.S. 47, 52 n. 2, 126 S.Ct. 1297, 164 L.Ed.2d 156 (2006). An issue must be ripe, or ready for review, before we act. Ripeness requires that the injury in fact be certainly impending. Nat'l Rifle Ass'n of Am., 132 F.3d at 280 (internal quotation marks and citation omitted). Article III gives claimants standing to file a lawsuit in federal court if they establish injury, causation, and redressability. Lujan v. Defenders of Wildlife, 504 U.S. 555, 560-61, 112 S.Ct. 2130, 119 L.Ed.2d 351 (1992). There is little to talk about with respect to the last two requirements: The United States caused the alleged injury by enacting the minimum coverage provision, and a favorable decision would redress the injury by invalidating the provision. There is more to talk about with respect to the injury requirement. There are two potential theories of injury  actual present injury and imminent future injury, id. at 560, 112 S.Ct. 2130  and plaintiffs satisfy both of them. As to actual injury, the declarations of Ceci and Steven Hyder show that the impending requirement to buy medical insurance on the private market has changed their present spending and saving habits. See John Ceci May 27, 2011 Decl. ¶¶ 7-8; Steven Hyder May 28, 2011 Decl. ¶ 8. Ceci and Steven Hyder filed these declarations, it is true, after a third plaintiff, Jann DeMars, obtained private insurance during this appeal. These new declarations do not contradict anything that Ceci and Steven Hyder said in their earlier declarations, and there is nothing exceptional, or for that matter surprising, about the contents of them, which largely parallel the original DeMars declaration. The United States concedes that the original DeMars declaration established injury, Gov't Letter Br. to this Court, at 3-5, as the district court concluded and we agree. That leaves the objection to our consideration of the new declarations that they were filed during the pendency of this appeal. This development, however, occurred in response to another development during the appeal  the United States's motion to dismiss filed in the aftermath of DeMars's disclosure that she had obtained medical insurance. Out of an abundance of caution, we could remand the case to the district court to permit testimony and cross-examination about the contents of the declarations. However, the United States offers no reason to believe that anything in the declarations is untrue, and we cannot think of any such reason ourselves. The Federal Rules of Appellate Procedure permit the filing of affidavits on appeal, particularly in response to a motion filed by an opposing party, and so do court decisions in settings similar to this one. See Fed. R.App. P. 10(e); Ouachita Watch League v. Jacobs, 463 F.3d 1163, 1170-71 (11th Cir.2006); Cabalceta v. Standard Fruit Co., 883 F.2d 1553, 1554-55, 1560 (11th Cir.1989); cf. United States v. Murdock, 398 F.3d 491, 500 (6th Cir. 2005). Summers v. Earth Island Institute, 555 U.S. 488, 129 S.Ct. 1142, 173 L.Ed.2d 1 (2009), does not change matters. There, [a]fter the District Court had entered judgment, and after the Government had filed its notice of appeal, respondents submitted additional affidavits to the District Court. Id. at 1150 n. . The Court did not consider the affidavits because respondents had not met the challenge to their standing at the time of judgment [and] could not remedy the defect retroactively. Id. No such problem arose here. In this case, the plaintiffs met the challenge to their standing at the time of judgment, and indeed the United States did not challenge that judgment on appeal. Only after DeMars purchased insurance and after the appeal had been filed did the United States file its motion to dismiss. In addition to establishing a present actual injury, plaintiffs have shown imminent injury  that the threatened injury is certainly impending. Friends of the Earth, Inc. v. Laidlaw Envtl. Servs. (TOC), Inc., 528 U.S. 167, 190, 120 S.Ct. 693, 145 L.Ed.2d 610 (2000). Imminence is a function of probability. And probabilities can be measured by many things, including the certainty that an event will come to pass. The uncertainty that the event will come to pass may be based on developments that may occur during a gap in time between the filing of a lawsuit and a threatened future injury. See 520 S. Mich. Ave. Assocs., Ltd. v. Devine, 433 F.3d 961, 962 (7th Cir.2006) (Standing depends on the probability of harm, not its temporal proximity.). On March 23, 2010, Congress passed a law that goes into effect on January 1, 2014. As the plaintiffs see it, the law requires them to do something that the Constitution prohibits: require that they buy and maintain a minimum amount of medical insurance. When the plaintiff is an object of the challenged action there is ordinarily little question that the action or inaction has caused him injury. Defenders of Wildlife, 504 U.S. at 561-62, 112 S.Ct. 2130. The only developments that could prevent this injury from occurring are not probable and indeed themselves highly speculative. Plaintiffs, true enough, could leave the country or die, and Congress could repeal the law. But these events are hardly probable and not the kinds of future developments that enter into the imminence inquiry. Riva v. Massachusetts, 61 F.3d 1003, 1011 (1st Cir.1995) (The demise of a party or the repeal of a statute will always be possible in any case of delayed enforcement, yet it is well settled that a time delay, without more, will not render a claim of statutory invalidity unripe if the application of the statute is otherwise sufficiently probable.). Plaintiffs also could buy insurance between the passage of the law and its effective date. This is less speculative, as underscored by the reality that one of the individual plaintiffs purchased insurance during the last year. But it makes no difference to the imminence inquiry because one of plaintiffs' theories is that Congress may not force individuals to buy or maintain private insurance. Plaintiffs also could become exempt from the requirement because their income could fall below the tax filing threshold or a disaster could befall them, making them eligible for the hardship exception. This, too, is not probable, particularly when it comes to all three individual plaintiffs, to say nothing of all of the members of Thomas More Law Center. In settings like this one, the Supreme Court has permitted plaintiffs to challenge laws well before their effective date. The Court has allowed challenges to go forward even though the complaints were filed almost six years and roughly three years before the laws went into effect. See New York v. United States, 505 U.S. 144, 153-54, 112 S.Ct. 2408, 120 L.Ed.2d 120 (1992); Pierce v. Soc'y of Sisters, 268 U.S. 510, 530, 536, 45 S.Ct. 571, 69 L.Ed. 1070 (1925); see also Village of Bensenville v. Fed. Aviation Admin., 376 F.3d 1114, 1119 (D.C.Cir.2004) (over thirteen years). While the point does not come up often, as most laws have immediate effective dates, these decisions establish that a lawsuit filed roughly three and a half years before the effective date of the law is not out of the ordinary. Although Pierce and New York speak of justiciability only in terms of ripeness, their reasoning applies equally to standing here. At least in this context, where the only Article III question concerns the imminence of the plaintiffs' injury, standing analysis parallels ripeness analysis. See Duke Power Co. v. Carolina Envtl. Study Grp., Inc., 438 U.S. 59, 81, 98 S.Ct. 2620, 57 L.Ed.2d 595 (1978) (To the extent that issues of ripeness involve, at least in part, the existence of a live `Case or Controversy,' our conclusion that appellees will sustain immediate injury ... and that such injury would be redressed by the relief requested would appear to satisfy this requirement. (internal quotation marks omitted)); Warth v. Seldin, 422 U.S. 490, 499 n. 10, 95 S.Ct. 2197, 45 L.Ed.2d 343 (1975) (The standing question... bears close affinity to questions of ripeness  whether the harm asserted has matured sufficiently to warrant judicial intervention....). Indeed if a defendant's ripeness arguments concern only the requirement that the injury be imminent rather than conjectural or hypothetical then it follows that our analysis of [the defendant's] standing challenge applies equally and interchangeably to its ripeness challenge. Brooklyn Legal Servs. Corp. v. Legal Servs. Corp., 462 F.3d 219, 225 (2d Cir.2006). Whether viewed through the lens of standing or of ripeness, the plaintiffs' challenge meets the requirements of Article III, especially in the context of a pre-enforcement facial challenge. In view of the probability, indeed virtual certainty, that the minimum coverage provision will apply to the plaintiffs on January 1, 2014, no function of standing law is advanced by requiring plaintiffs to wait until six months or one year before the effective date to file this lawsuit. There is no reason to think that plaintiffs' situation will change. And there is no reason to think the law will change. By permitting this lawsuit to be filed three and one-half years before the effective date, as opposed to one year before the effective date, the only thing that changes is that all three layers of the federal judiciary will be able to reach considered merits decisions, as opposed to rushed interim ( e.g., stay) decisions, before the law takes effect. The former is certainly preferable to the latter, at least in the current setting of this case. Nor is their claim insufficiently concrete and particularized. Defenders of Wildlife, 504 U.S. at 560, 112 S.Ct. 2130. While `some day' intentions to travel somewhere or to do something that might implicate a federal law do not support a finding of the `actual or imminent' injury that the cases demand, id. at 564, 112 S.Ct. 2130, plaintiffs' situations are not nearly so ephemeral. There is no trip that must be taken, no ticket that must be purchased, before the injury occurs. See id. at 564 n. 2, 112 S.Ct. 2130. The plaintiffs claim a constitutional right to be free of the minimum coverage provision, and the only thing saving them from it at this point is two and a half more years and an exceedingly concrete some day: January 1, 2014. See 26 U.S.C. § 5000A(a). McConnell v. Federal Election Commission, 540 U.S. 93, 124 S.Ct. 619, 157 L.Ed.2d 491 (2003), does not undermine this conclusion. There the Court ruled that several plaintiffs did not have standing to challenge a provision of the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act because their alleged injury ... [was] too remote temporally. Id. at 226, 124 S.Ct. 619. The McConnell plaintiffs filed a lawsuit in March 2002, 251 F.Supp.2d 176, 206 (D.D.C.2003), and the earliest day [McConnell] could be affected by [the challenged provision was] 45 days before the Republican primary in 2008. 540 U.S. at 226, 124 S.Ct. 619. The Court, however, could not know whether the plaintiffs would even suffer an injury six years later. Id. The challenged provision would affect the McConnell plaintiffs only if the following things happened in an election six years later: (1) a challenger ran in the primary or election; (2) the plaintiff created an advertisement mentioning the challenger; (3) the advertisement did not identify the plaintiff by name; and (4) the broadcasters attempted to charge McConnell more than their lowest unit rate for his ads. Id. at 224-25, 124 S.Ct. 619. A candidate cannot guarantee (much less prove) that another person will run against him six years down the road or that a broadcaster will offer him a less than favorable price, and it is unknowable what type of political advertisements the candidate will run when the time comes. The plaintiffs have no similar problem in this case. The Act itself proves they will be required to purchase insurance and maintain it when the time comes. Unlike the McConnell plaintiffs, who had not taken any action that would subject them to the Act, the plaintiffs need not do anything to become subject to the Act. That, indeed, is their key theory  that mere existence should not be a basis for requiring someone to buy health insurance on the private market. Plaintiffs have standing to bring this claim.
The United States and the plaintiffs now agree that the Anti-Injunction Act does not bar this action. Yet because this limitation goes to the subject matter jurisdiction of the federal courts, the parties' agreement by itself does not permit us to review this challenge. 26 U.S.C. § 7421(a); see Arbaugh v. Y & H Corp., 546 U.S. 500, 515-16 & n. 11, 126 S.Ct. 1235, 163 L.Ed.2d 1097 (2006). The Anti-Injunction Act says that no suit for the purpose of restraining the assessment or collection of any tax shall be maintained in any court. 26 U.S.C. § 7421(a). In language at least as broad as the Anti-Injunction Act, Bob Jones Univ. v. Simon, 416 U.S. 725, 732 n. 7, 94 S.Ct. 2038, 40 L.Ed.2d 496 (1974), the Declaratory Judgment Act forbids declaratory judgment actions with respect to Federal taxes. 28 U.S.C. § 2201(a). The relevant terminology suggests that we may hear this action. While the Anti-Injunction Act applies only to tax[es], 26 U.S.C. § 7421(a), Congress called the shared-responsibility payment a penalty. See id. § 5000A. In many contexts, the law treats taxes and penalties as mutually exclusive. See, e.g., United States v. Reorganized CF & I Fabricators of Utah, Inc., 518 U.S. 213, 220, 116 S.Ct. 2106, 135 L.Ed.2d 506 (1996) (determining whether, under section 507(a)(7) of the Bankruptcy Code, a particular exaction was a `tax' []as distinct from a ... penalty); Dep't of Revenue of Mont. v. Kurth Ranch, 511 U.S. 767, 784, 114 S.Ct. 1937, 128 L.Ed.2d 767 (1994) (determining that a provision labeled a tax was a penalty and therefore barred by the Double Jeopardy Clause); Bailey v. Drexel Furniture Co., 259 U.S. 20, 38, 42 S.Ct. 449, 66 L.Ed. 817 (1922) (construing Congress's taxing power under Article I, § 8, cl. 1, based on [t]he difference between a tax and a penalty). Congress's choice of words  barring litigation over tax[es] in section 7421 but imposing a penalty in section 5000A  suggests that the former does not cover the latter. Other provisions of the Internal Revenue Code, to be sure, show that some penalties amount to taxes for purposes of the Anti-Injunction Act. Not surprisingly, for example, chapter 68 of the Revenue Code imposes penalties on individuals who fail to pay their taxes. 26 U.S.C. § 6651. Less obviously, but to similar effect, subchapter B of chapter 68 of the Revenue Code imposes other penalties related to the enforcement of traditional taxes. See, e.g., id. § 6676 (penalty for erroneously claiming refunds); id. § 6704 (penalty for failing to keep certain records). Under section 6671, any reference in this title to `tax' imposed by this title shall be deemed also to refer to the penalties and liabilities provided by [subchapter B of chapter 68]. See also id. §§ 6201; 6665(a)(2). All of these penalties thus count as taxes, including for purposes of the Anti-Injunction Act. See Herring v. Moore, 735 F.2d 797, 798 (5th Cir.1984) (per curiam); Souther v. Mihlbachler, 701 F.2d 131, 132 (10th Cir.1983) (per curiam); Prof'l Eng'rs, Inc. v. United States, 527 F.2d 597, 599 (4th Cir.1975). Otherwise, the recalcitrant tax protester could sue to preempt collection of a substantial monetary charge (accumulated penalties and interest) but not what will often be a smaller charge (the tax owed). None of this affects the shared-responsibility payment, a penalty triggered by failure to comply with the minimum coverage provision. Section 5000A is not a penalty provided by chapter 68 of the Revenue Code. Congress placed the penalty in chapter 48 of the Revenue Code, and it did not include a provision treating the penalty as a tax in the title, as it did with penalties provided in chapter 68. Distinct words have distinct meanings. Congress said one thing in sections 6665(a)(2) and 6671(a), and something else in section 5000A, and we should respect the difference. That is particularly so where, as here, Congress had a reason for creating a difference: Unlike the penalties listed in chapter 68, the shared responsibility payment has nothing to do with tax enforcement. Cf. Mobile Republican Assembly v. United States, 353 F.3d 1357, 1362 n. 5 (11th Cir.2003) (holding that tax penalties imposed for substantive violations of laws not directly related to the tax code do not implicate the Anti-Injunction Act). Section 5000A(g)(1), it is true, says that [t]he penalty provided by this section shall be paid upon notice and demand by the Secretary, and ... shall be assessed and collected in the same manner as an assessable penalty under subchapter B of chapter 68. 26 U.S.C. § 5000A(g)(1) (emphasis added). The assessable penalties under subchapter B in turn shall be paid upon notice and demand by the Secretary, and shall be assessed and collected in the same manner as taxes. Id. § 6671(a). In the context of a shared-responsibility payment to the United States for failing to buy medical insurance, however, the most natural reading of the provision is that the manner of assessment and collection mentioned in sections 5000A(g)(1) and 6671(a) refers to the mechanisms the Internal Revenue Service employs to enforce penalties, not to the bar against pre-enforcement challenges to taxes. The same is true of other provisions in the Code treating penalties as taxes. All that section 6665(a)(2) and section 6671(a) show is that Congress intended to treat certain penalties as taxes in certain contexts. To read these provisions loosely to suggest that every penalty is a tax would render each particular provision superfluous. That conclusion makes all the more sense in the context of the Affordable Care Act, which prohibits the Internal Revenue Service from using the customary tools available for collecting taxes and penalties, the very tools the Anti-Injunction Act was enacted to protect. See Bob Jones Univ., 416 U.S. at 736, 94 S.Ct. 2038. In collecting the health care penalty, the Internal Revenue Service may not impose liens on an individual's property, place levies on an individual's pay, or bring criminal charges. 26 U.S.C. § 5000A(g)(2)(B). All that the Internal Revenue Service may do is one of two things. It may deduct past-due penalties from future tax refunds, a form of enforcement exceedingly unlikely to implicate the Anti-Injunction Act. Or it may bring a collection action, which most individuals would be unlikely to preempt  in truth invite  by bringing their own lawsuit. Last of all, because the minimum coverage provision does not come into effect until 2014 (and the penalty could not be assessed or collected until at least a year later), this lawsuit will hardly interfere with the Government's need to assess and collect taxes as expeditiously as possible. Bob Jones Univ., 416 U.S. at 736, 94 S.Ct. 2038. Here, the Anti-Injunction Act does not remove our jurisdiction to consider this claim.