A federal court has dealt another blow to legal efforts to cripple Obamacare.
The D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals denied a request for a rehearing on a lawsuit challenging the Senate violated the Constitution when it passed funding for the law. The decision comes more than a month after the Supreme Court rejected a different challenge to the law’s subsidies.
The current case focused on whether the law is unconstitutional and goes back to the law’s passage in 2010. The Constitution requires that a bill that raises revenue must originate in the House and not in the Senate.
Then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid attached the Affordable Care Act to a House bill on homeowner tax credits for military service members.
The lawsuit, brought by the Pacific Legal Foundation, charged that the House bill had nothing to do with healthcare reform.
However, the appeals court unanimously disagreed, rejecting the lawsuit last year by saying that Obamacare wasn’t a bill for “raising revenue” and therefore the origination clause doesn’t apply.
The foundation filed a request for a rehearing, which was denied Friday. The foundation, which argues for property rights cases and other legal issues, was undeterred.
“We knew going in that this case would ultimately end up on the Supreme Court’s doorstep, and now it’s time,” the foundation said.
It is not what the foundation’s chances are of getting the case to the high court.
The appeals court previously noted Supreme Court precedence when it initially dismissed the lawsuit.
Prior Supreme Court cases have found if a bill’s revenue-raising portion is incidental to its primary purpose then the origination clause doesn’t apply, an opinion from the appeals court said.
The denial of a rehearing was not unexpected, as appeals courts rarely grant such requests, Timothy Jost, a legal professor at Washington & Lee University, has said.
The rejection is another blow to Obamacare opponents hopes of dismantling the controversial healthcare law through the courts.
Earlier this summer, the Supreme Court voted 6-3 in favor of Obamacare in the case King v. Burwell. That challenge, brought by the libertarian think tank Competitive Enterprise Institute, charged that the federal government didn’t have the authority to provide subsidies to states that did not set up their own healthcare exchange.
The challenge noted that law’s text specifically says the subsidies should go only to the state-run exchanges. However, a majority of the justices found that the intent of the law was for all states to get the subsidies, with Chief Justice John Roberts writing the majority opinion.
