Court tosses NY case that could have expanded gun rights Anti-climactic end to case is disappointment to gun rights advocates
By Mark Sherman
Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court sidestepped a major decision on gun rights Monday in a dispute over New York City's former ban on transporting guns.
The justices threw out a challenge from gun rights groups. It ruled that the city's move to ease restrictions on taking licensed, locked and unloaded guns outside the city limits, coupled with a change in state law to prevent New York from reviving the ban, left the court with nothing to decide. The court asked a lower court to consider whether the city's new rules still pose problems for gun owners.
The anti-climactic end to the Supreme Court case is a disappointment to gun rights advocates and relief to gun control groups who thought a conservative Supreme Court majority fortified by two appointees of President Donald Trump, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, might use the case to expand on landmark decisions from a decade ago that established a right to keep a gun at home for self-defense.
But other guns cases remain in the high court's pipeline and the justices could decide to hear one or more of those next term.
Although the opinion was unsigned, the court was split, 6-3, over the outcome.
Gorsuch joined Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas in dissenting from the dismissal. Kavanaugh wrote a brief concurring opinion in which he agreed with the result, but also said the court should take up another guns case soon.
Lower courts upheld the regulation, but the Supreme Court's decision early in 2019 to step into the case signaled a revived interest in gun rights from a court with two new justices.
Officials at both the city and state level scrambled to find a way to remove the case from the justices' grasp. Not only did the city change its regulation to allow licensed gun owners to transport their weapons to locations outside New York's five boroughs, but the state enacted a law barring cities from imposing the challenged restrictions.
Those moves failed to get the court to dismiss the case before arguments in December.
Court rules insurers can collect $12B under health care law
By Mark Sherman
Associated Press
WASHINGTON (AP) — The Supreme Court ruled Monday that insurance companies can collect $12 billion from the federal government to cover their losses in the early years of the health care law championed by President Barack Obama.
Insurers are entitled to the money under a provision of the “Obamacare” health law that promised the companies a financial cushion for losses they might incur by selling coverage to people in the marketplaces created by the health care law, the justices said by an 8-1 vote.
The program only lasted three years, but Congress inserted a provision in the Health and Human Services Department’s spending bills from 2015 to 2017 to limit payments under the “risk corridors” program. Both the Obama and Trump administrations had argued that the provision means the government has no obligation to pay.
But Justice Sonia Sotomayor said in her opinion for the court that the congressional action was not sufficient to repeal the government’s commitment to pay. “These holdings reflect a principle as old as the Nation itself: The Government should honor its obligations,” Sotomayor wrote.
In dissent, Justice Samuel Alito wrote that the court’s decision “has the effect of providing a massive bailout for insurance companies that took a calculated risk and lost. These companies chose to participate in an Affordable Care Act program that they thought would be profitable.”
The companies, which sold insurance in Alaska, Illinois, Maine, North Carolina, Oregon and Washington, cite HHS statistics to claim they are owed $12 billion.
The case is separate from a challenge to the health care law that the court has agreed to hear in its term that begins in October.
