What legal precedent says the members of this volunteer task force must be appointed by the President and confirmed by the Senate? They are not Cabinet members. They don't lead an agency. What other similar task force required that level of action?
The motivation for this ruling is retribution against Obama and to further cripple the ACA. The ruling targets women, gays, blacks, vulnerable minorities, vaccines, and government support of health care. It is another far right Christofascist ruling to achieve some sort of win by religious fanatics. The motive for the ruling itself is rooted in hate, not health. The task force not being appointed and confirmed, is a red herring justification for their hate in furtherance of their agenda.
None of what you said will happen, and you know it. Hopefully, the ruling will be overturned. If this ruling stands, people will die. A lot of people will die due to lack of preventive care. But as usual, you mention nothing about the impact and damage and death this ruling has the potential to inflict on millions of people. But yeah, let's all play legal gamesmanship for years while people die because they don't have the resources to get screened. The ruling is just another attempt to confuse, obstruct, and tear apart the ACA and the public safety net at the expense of lives... all to "own the libs".
I don't CARE about the motivation -- well, I might if there were visiting aliens involved, because that would at least be interesting.
If Biden were an effective president he would find a way to get around this, and the official appointments would serve; he could even state that it was a temporary measure until the next higher court rules. In fact I was reminded of something last night: under certain circumstances the government can request an immediate advancement to the next higher course on the basis of national need, and this certainly qualifies! With insurance companies holding off changing anything (almost certainly because they know it will just be reversed and it's simpler to continue an existing policy), asking for immediate advancement and requesting a stay could be accomplished in a week.
The thing is that technically speaking the judge is correct; the Appointments clause requires that the president appoint "all other Officers of the United States, whose Appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by Law". But the critical clause is the next one: "but the Congress may by Law vest the Appointment of such inferior Officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the Courts of Law, or in the Heads of Departments". The devil is in the details, and it all depends on whether Congress actually designated by law who appoints them and in fact whether the law uses the word "appoint"; and according to the Congressional Mandate establishing the Preventative Services Task Force merely says "The Director shall convene" -- no mention is made of "appointment", and that's the detail this judge is probably hanging his ruling on (I didn't bother to try to wade through whatever extensive verbiage he piled up to justify this).
So all Congress would have to do is amend the law by adding the word "appoint" so it reads "The Director shall appoint and convene" -- end of issue. As for the courts, since this is a final ruling the judge can't weasel out of an appeal being made that should have been made in 2018 when this case started but since he didn't hand down a final ruling at that point he had discretion whether or not to allow an appeal -- once a district court makes a final ruling, it can be immediately appealed to a circuit court. In 2018 most of the states and the federal government called on this judge to certify the case for appeal and he basically ignored them; this time he has no say.
Given the technically correct ruling, though, and the makeup of the Fifth Circuit, I would expect an appeal there to affirm the judge's ruling, and the same at the Supreme Court level. It's in a way just semantics, but oh, do lawyers love semantics! so the best resolution would be to just add those two words to the law -- and in fact that may be the only solution. While a good argument could be made that by convening the task force the Director has
de facto appointed them, and that this was Congress' intent, at the moment the members are not appointed
de jure.
So this is likely going to be up to Congress; the question is what games will be played because of it. A sensible Congress would look at the record and say, "Yes, the idea was that by selecting and convening this task force the Director was to be understood as having appointed them", and just add "appoint and" in front of "convene", and that would be the end of it under the Appointments Clause; the Director of the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality is appointed by the president as established by Congress.
Note: I earlier thought this task force was at a higher level than it is; that's what I get for relying on the media. This is no higher than fourth echelon: it's selected by a Director who reports to a Director who reports to a Secretary, as best I can figure it out, so it would be ludicrous to expect Senate confirmation except for the fact that the law didnb't use the word "appoint" so this judge read it as requiring the default position. If it's resolved as I suggest, he will have inadvertently done the Republic a favor by making Congress aware that they need to be more specific in future laws... to avoid rulings like this from picky judges whatever their motivation.
