Over the past week, federal appellate courts dealt a one-two punch to the national conservative agenda. Taken together, they stand as a rare defense of low-income Americans to get affordable health care and exercise their right to vote.
In 2013, Arkansas’s Democratic governor expanded Medicaid under Obamacare to include all qualified individuals with income up to 133 percent of the poverty level. But Republicans in Arkansas proposed new restrictions on who gets Medicaid, proposing that people aged 19-49 be required to work 80 hours per month in order to receive Medicaid, with only limited exceptions. HHS greenlighted the idea, re-naming it “community engagement.
Usually, agencies get loads of deference when they interpret federal statutes that Congress allows them to implement. And ironically, it’s the conservative end of the bench—including jurists like Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch—that tends tofederal agencies’ power, believing instead that courts should be more proactive in challenging agency overreach. The D.C. Circuit did that in this case.
In a 78-page opinion, a three-judge panel of the federal appeals court held that the fee add-on for felons “punishes those who cannot pay more harshly than those who can—and does so by continuing to deny them access to the ballot box,” thus violating the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
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