Last March, during the three days of oral argument over the constitutionality of Obamacare in NFIB v. Sebelius, Paul Clement argued that if the individual mandate provision of Obamacare was unconstitutional, then the entire 1,000-plus page law should be overturned. He supported his argument with one of the longest Supreme Court decisions in history, Buckley v. Valeo. In that 1976 decision, instead of overturning the Federal Election Campaign Act and sending it back to Congress, the Court selectively upheld, overturned or modified parts of the law. Far from clarifying the law's meaning, Buckley set the stage for decades of lawsuits that continue to this day.
