Court's health law ruling could limit Congress' powers

— -- The insurance mandate survives, but Congress' power might never be the same.

That was the upshot of the Supreme Court's complex decision on Thursday, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, upholding the core of President Obama's landmark health care overhaul, while simultaneously embracing potentially significant new limits on the sweep of the federal government's authority to regulate commerce and spend money.

In a splintered decision, Roberts and the court's four more liberal justices held that the insurance mandate was nothing more than a tax on people who did not have health coverage, and that the Constitution gives Congress the ability to impose those types of taxes.

But Roberts also joined the court's conservatives and Justice Anthony Kennedy in finding that Congress' separate power to regulate commerce did not give lawmakers the authority to force people to buy insurance if they don't want to. And he joined six other justices in saying that Congress could not use its checkbook to coerce state officials into going along with policies they don't like, the first time in more than a generation that the court had put any real limits on the federal government's power to spend money.

Those findings mean nothing for the future of the health care law, because its status as a tax made it constitutional. But lawyers on both sides of the case said they could change the contours of the federal government's authority for years to come.

Yale law professor Akhil Reed Amar said Roberts' approach was "brilliant." Because Roberts voted with the court's liberals to uphold the mandate, it's hard to cast him as a partisan. But "he did so even as he moved the case law to the right by narrowing the scope of Congress' Commerce Clause power and accepting the conservative principles."

The insurance mandate challenge was one of the broadest tests of the federal government's authority ever to reach the Supreme Court. It raised questions of how far Congress could go under its constitutional powers to regulate commerce, spend money and impose taxes — the provisions that underpin many, if not most, federal laws.

And while lawyers who challenged the law said they were disappointed that they had not persuaded Roberts — and, by extension, the court — to find that the individual mandate was unconstitutional, many said they were encouraged by its reasoning. As recently as two years ago, many constitutional scholars had dismissed the constitutional objections to the health law as baseless; on Thursday, most of those objections commanded a majority of the justices.

"All of us, of course, are disappointed with the ultimate outcome today, but we cannot lose sight of what we've accomplished," said Pam Bondi, the attorney general in Florida, one of the 26 states that had challenged the health law. "We learned that there are enforceable limits on Congress' power under the Commerce Clause. We've always said that is very important."

Similarly, Paul Clement, the former Bush administration lawyer who argued most of the challenge before the justices, said Thursday that "it would be hard to think of a case where more of the arguments we made were accepted by the court" even though he lost. He said the court's 7-2 decision to limit the penalties states could face for opting out of a Medicaid expansion was "really quite significant."

Still, not all of the challengers shared that view.

"You can look for silver linings in the cloud, but it's still a cloud," said George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin, who wrote a brief opposing the health law. He said that Thursday's decision offers Congress a road map to enact similar laws in the future by crafting them as taxes instead of mandates.