This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Wednesday, November 18th, 2020.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Supreme Court recently heard the latest high-profile challenge to the Affordable Care Act.

One of the key issues is whether or not the individual mandate to secure health insurance,

with its penalties now reduced to zero, is really a mandate at all.

Cato's Ilia Shapiro and Michael Cannon detail what happened at oral argument.

Well the first thing you have to understand it's not a redo of National Federation of Independent Business versus Sebelius, the 2012 case where famously

or infamously John Roberts transmogrified the individual mandate, re-characterizing it as a tax to uphold it under the Constitution's

taxing power.

When Congress zeroed out that tax or penalty, as you wish, in in 2017 it didn't touch the rest of the law so the

severability question what lawyers talk about with when a particular

provision is constitutionally defective how much of the rest of the law has to fall,

that analysis is very different.

So you come to this case.

First, like any case, there has to be standing.

And that brings kind of a

metaphysical question of if you have a command without any

enforcement of it who is hurt. Can anyone

whether the state's bringing the claim here or the

individual plaintiffs who feel that they are

commanded even if the IRS or anybody else is not going to go after them for violating that claim,

do they have standing?

...