Whether or not President Obama is able to get the Senate to vote on a Supreme Court nomination this year, the sudden death of Justice Antonin Scalia could have major implications for a range of key issues of interest to those working in health care and human resources.
For starters, there are several challenges to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act whose fate might be different without Scalia on the court.
A number of those suits target the PPACA contraception mandate that a previous 5-4 Supreme Court ruling already poked holes in.
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Without Scalia, it is likely that the court could split 4-4 on further challenges to the contraception mandate.
When the court deadlocks, typically that means the ruling of the lower court is affirmed, but lower federal courts have issued conflicting rulings on the issue.
"Affirming by an evenly divided court will leave the circuit split," Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the law school at the University of California, Irvine, told the New York Times. "I think that may cause pressure to see if there is a way for them to come up with a majority or, if not, to put the cases over for re-argument."
Scalia's death will also likely produce a 4-4 decision in a big case surrounding the ability of public sector unions to mandate that employees they represent pay dues.
The suit, brought by California teachers who do not want to pay dues to the union that bargains on their behalf, threatens to essentially make every public sector workplace in the U.S. "right to work," in which workers cannot be required to pay for the costs of collective bargaining.
In the hearing over the union case, it seemed that the court was headed towards a 5-4 decision to strike down mandatory dues as an unconstitutional infringement on the first amendment rights of employees who oppose the union.
It would not affect, however, the the right that unions still retain in 24 states to negotiate mandatory dues in contracts with private sector employers.
But with Scalia gone, that decision will almost certainly result in a 4-4 split, affirming the ruling of lower courts that have sided with the union.
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