In 1976, the court approved three of those statutes, providing a blueprint for a constitutional death penalty law.
He wrote: "Congress cannot change whether an exaction is a tax or a penalty for constitutional purposes simply by describing it as one or the other".
Two federal district judges nominated by Democratic presidents have concluded that the individual mandate requiring people to buy health insurance or pay a penalty is constitutional.
The last time an amendment was used to challenge a State Supreme Court ruling was in 1992, when voters and legislators reaffirmed that the death penalty was constitutional.
Texas has accounted for more than half of such executions since 1976, when the Supreme Court held that the death penalty was constitutional.
"I am not morally opposed to capital punishment," Ms. Kagan wrote to a senator, adding that she "accepted" the Supreme Court's precedents upholding "the death penalty as constitutional in a wide variety of cases and circumstances".
Similarly, two late liberal justices, William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall, adamantly refused to accept the view of the majority that the death penalty is constitutional, infuriating the conservatives by voting mechanically to review every sentence and stay every execution.
Affordable Care Act cases 2012 Upheld most provisions of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (2010), finding that the law's requirement that almost all Americans obtain health insurance by 2014 or pay a penalty is constitutional under Congress's taxing power.
The three main areas under review are whether the judges should rule on the reforms now rather than when they come into force; whether the central mandate requiring everyone to hold health insurance, or face a penalty, is constitutional; and if it is not, whether the rest of the reforms should be allowed to stand.
Within two years the Supreme Court ruled in McCleskey v. Kemp that the death penalty was constitutional even though the killers of whites were more often sentenced to death than the killers of blacks, a decision that triggered an increase in executions over the next decade.
