Ken Paxton: Loser

#ACA is out.

Breyer for a 7-2 Court says plaintiffs lacked standing.#ACA survives:https://t.co/DYCMs7CA87

— Steve Vladeck (@steve_vladeck) June 17, 2021

Paxton's Quixotic attempt to overturn the 2020 Presidential election is back in the news. Tack this one onto it:

The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act as enacted in 2010 re- quired most Americans to obtain minimum essential health insurance coverage and imposed a monetary penalty upon most individuals who failed to do so. Amendments to the Act in 2017 effectively nullified the penalty by setting its amount to $0. Subsequently, Texas (along with over a dozen States and two individuals) brought suit against federal officials, claiming that without the penalty the Act’s minimum essen- tial coverage provision, codified at 26 U. S. C. §5000A(a), is unconsti- tutional. They sought a declaration that the provision is unconstitu- tional, a finding that the rest of the Act is not severable from §5000A(a), and an injunction against enforcement of the rest of the Act. The District Court determined that the individual plaintiffs had standing. It also found §5000A(a) both unconstitutional and not sev- erable from the rest of the Act. The Fifth Circuit agreed as to the ex- istence of standing and the unconstitutionality of §5000A(a), but con- cluded that the District Court’s severability analysis provided insufficient justification to strike down the entire Act. Petitioner Cal- ifornia and other States intervened to defend the Act’s constitutional- ity and to seek further review.

Held: Plaintiffs do not have standing to challenge §5000A(a)’s minimum essential coverage provision because they have not shown a past or future injury fairly traceable to defendants’ conduct enforcing the spe- cific statutory provision they attack as unconstitutional. Pp. 4–16.

The legalese means Texas and the other plaintiffs couldn't even get in the courthouse door.  It's a "threshold issue," a nice metaphor for saying you can't even cross the threshold of the courthouse.