THAT action that the Trump admin just presented to court is NOT what US Republican lawmakers want dropped in their laps 4 months from a general election that they beginning to see maybe a political blood bath for their party….
The judges in the high court HAVE to want to leave this alone until after the election…
A Biden Presidency with Democrats in control of the Senate will make this go away….
President Trump insists on the campaign trail that he wants to protect insurance coverage for people with preexisting conditions. His legal team just told the Supreme Court otherwise.
The 82-page brief submitted late Thursday night by Trump’s representatives states crisply that the president wants to get rid of every provision of the Affordable Care Act.
Solicitor General Noel Francisco packs in a string of rhetorical flourishes that may draw cheers at a Federalist Society legal conference but will inevitably appear as factual citations to back up attack ads that Democrats plan to run this fall against vulnerable Senate Republicans, in a redux of the messaging that proved so potent in the 2018 midterms.
President Trump celebrates the passage of the tax bill with congressional Republicans in December 2017. His lawyers now say everyone who voted for this bill did so intending to get rid of the Affordable Care Act. (Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post)
The Trump team’s core argument is that every Republican who voted for the tax cuts three years ago knowingly voted to destroy the 2010 law in its entirely, not just to get rid of the mandate that individuals buy health insurance. And, because the Supreme Court previously upheld the constitutionality of the law on the grounds that the individual mandate is a tax, Trump’s lawyers say that the whole system became invalid once Congress got rid of the penalty for not carrying health insurance.
“Nothing the 2017 Congress did demonstrates it would have intended the rest of the ACA to continue to operate in the absence of these … integral provisions,” Francisco writes in his brief, which is co-signed by four other Trump appointees at the Justice Department. “The entire ACA thus must fall with the individual mandate.”
The brief is full of little gifts like this to Joe Biden and Democrats who hope to ride his coattails down the ballot. Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) voted against repealing Obamacare in 2017, which she touts as evidence of her independence, but then she voted for the tax legislation. This brief can also be used as a cudgel to attack GOP Sens. Thom Tillis (N.C.), Joni Ernst (Iowa) and David Perdue (Ga.), who separately each voted to repeal the underlying law. Recent polls show those three senators are locked in tight races as they seek second terms. Appointed Sen. Martha McSally (R-Ariz.), who trails Democratic challenger Mark Kelly in multiple polls, also voted for the tax bill as a member of the House.
From a political perspective, the timing of the Trump administration’s maneuver to get rid of the law, root and branch, is suboptimal for GOP candidates on the ballot this year. The justices are unlikely to make a final decision until after the November election on the legal challenge by Republican state attorneys general, ensuring that this looms as an issue in the fall campaign.
The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services revealed earlier Thursday that 487,000 people signed up for health-care plans during the special enrollment period on Healthcare.gov after losing their employer-covered plans, probably as a result of the economic crisis caused by the novel coronavirus.
Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee who was vice president when the law was enacted, began a concerted effort during a campaign stop in Pennsylvania on Thursday afternoon to link Trump’s response to the coronavirus with his bid to uproot the ACA. He argued that having survived covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, could be considered a preexisting condition and said this could be used to deny coverage….