Republicans Will Finally Get Obamacare in Front of Trump's Supreme Court Justices
One of the major reasons that establishment Republicans have tolerated Donald Trump is his helping secure one of the most reactionary and conservative Supreme Courts in decades. With the loss of swing vote Anthony Kennedy and the installation of the uber-partisan Brett Kavanaugh, Congressional Republicans finally have a Court that won't be likely to blink when forced to choose between billionaire interests and trivial concerns like voting rights.
On Friday, just before the end of the enrollment period for Affordable Care Act, a federal judge in Texas ruled the law unconstitutional. While the White House has acknowledged that it will still be implementing the law (as long as under-funding and refusing to promote it count as implementing), it's quite clear that for the third time Obamacare will be heading to the Supreme Court.
The latest ruling hinges on a 2017 change to the law from the Republican-controlled Congress that eliminated the penalty for not having health insurance. From Politico:
U.S. District Court Judge Reed O’Connor, a George W. Bush appointee in Fort Worth, Texas, issued the decision gutting the law in response to a lawsuit from 20 conservative-led states that sought to have the Affordable Care Act tossed out. They successfully argued that the mandate penalty was a critical linchpin of the law and that without it, the entire frameworks is rendered unconstitutional.
“In sum, the Individual Mandate ‘is so interwoven with [the ACA’s] regulations that they cannot be separated. None of them can stand,’” O’Connor wrote.
For his part, Trump celebrated the news on Twitter and called on Congress to implement some kind of new health care plan that would protect pre-existing conditions, which is still more evidence that he either doesn't know or doesn't care what's actually going on around him. Despite controlling both houses of Congress for four years, Republicans haven't been able to come up with any consensus on how or even whether to make sure that people with pre-existing conditions should be protected from being gouged into bankruptcy by insurance companies.
As for the chances that the ruling stands, Politico reports that one of the architects behind the last major legal challenge to the Affordable Care Act called this week's ruling completely "unmoored from the relevant legal authorities and doctrine." That's all well and good, but the reality is that it doesn't matter what legal authorities or doctrines say—all Trump and the Republicans need is for the conservative justices to decide to throw millions of Americans off of their health care. That's part of the reason they're on the Court, after all.
