Biden kills federal government's Supreme Court challenge to Obamacare

President Biden on Wednesday changed the federal government's position in a Supreme Court case where former President Donald Trump challenged the Affordable Care Act's constitutionality.

The case, California v. Texas, was argued a week after the 2020 election. Many legal experts predicted that Biden would drop the government's offense on the act soon after he took office. In a letter to the court, Deputy Solicitor General Edwin Kneedler wrote that the Biden’s Justice Department "reconsidered" the facts of the case and now opposes Trump’s position.

The switch comes after Trump, along with Texas and a collection of Republican-led states, argued in November that Obamacare was unconstitutional because its individual mandate, a tax which propped up the law’s constitutionality in past cases, was wiped out by Congress in 2017. They argued that the individual mandate was "inseverable" from the rest of the act and that because of that fact, all of Obamacare must fall.

Kneedler wrote that the Biden Justice Department, on the other hand, believes the federal government now believes that setting the mandate at zero does not make the act unconstitutional.