A small correction:
Concerned GOPers: We didn’t intend to do so. (Liars) We didn’t know the consequence. (Liars, again) We’re now in conflict with the WH. (Liars yet again)
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If the entire act is struck down other courts will enjoin the immediate deconstruction of the exchanges and suspension of the Medicare expansions to prevent the obvious and severe hardship it would immediately impose. What’s happened is access to coverage is now effectively a right, and the courts will not allow it to be snatched away without a program to replace it. Repeal will be a legal fact but won’t become a practical fact, the program will continue in a legal limbo. That’s as long as we have a functioning judicial system, always an open question when an autocrat is expanding his power.
And then they’ll be facing once again the unsolvable dilemma R’s created for themselves, the fact that they never had any chance of writing a replacement bill because the ACA was their friggin’ bill to begin with! There are only a few feasible ways to insure everyone, and among them the only market-based approach is the three-legged stool approach embodied in the ACA. They’ve gone at this so many times and failed for the simple fact that there is no other private market-based solution, everything they might try still looks just like Obamacare. That leaves single payer, or socialising the healthcare sector, neither of which the R’s will touch, one of which the D’s will be happy to run on and build after they win. So that’s why they’re terrified of this court case, if they win it they’ve hung their own asses out to dry.
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“Those of us who believed that [mandate] was unconstitutional at the time, depending how you construct the legal argument, would have thought therefore it makes the whole thing unconstitutional, so it’s not inconsistent,” Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH), an architect of the 2017 tax bill, said. “But that’s not what we thought was going to happen at that time [of the 2017 tax bill vote]."
So if the logical consequence of his action is not what he thought would happen, what does that make him?
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Don’t get me wrong, I would prefer for the Supreme Court to throw out this lawsuit and for Obamacare to stand. However, I have no faith that the current SCOTUS will do what is right.
If we truly want to make healthcare a right, we need to get solid Democratic majorities. Republicans truly showing how cruel they can be is an effective method towards that goal.
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“would create an insurance market quite unlike the one that Congress intended, with potentially serious consequences for the stability of the market.”
Gee, wasn’t that what we were saying all along, from getting rid of the individual mandate to making Medicaid available for people who couldn’t afford insurance but needed the healthcare? And who was it that opposed the legislation and structured the implementation so Obamacare was destined to struggle? It’s on the tip of my tongue.
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The people working in the DOJ gotta be updating their resumes…working in such a vacuous hellhole has got to be dispiriting for those with any integrity or self respect.
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Don’t believe any Republican, since the beginning they have hated the ACA. They want it gone and that has been the plan all along. All they are doing is lying to cover their asses in the next election.
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dog catches car?
chickens now home to roost?
careful what you wish for?
gee repubes, do you think that there are any other behaviors that you are promoting/buttressing that may come back to haunt you? You wouldn’t be burning any bridges that you may want to utilize in the very near future now would you?
A governing philosophy of “owning the libs” might not be a long term effective approach, kinda like throwing your garbage over the fence for, say, 40 years and then asking your neighbor why he thinks you are a total asshole
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Was wondering about that. We may see a mass bolting for the doors like at State.
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and they need to talk about “the Republicans” attempt to overturn ACA and remove healthcare coverage for millions - not just the Trump Administration. This action is the culmination of all of the nonsense the R’s have been peddling for years; the Democratic candidates need to make sure they can’t run and hide from it now
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Without a penalty for not buying insurance, the whole law becomes financially unsustainable.
Requiring coverage for pre-existing conditions but not also requiring everybody buy insurance is like allowing people to buy car insurance after they have an accident and then requiring the insurance company to pay for the pre-existing accident.
Take away the individual mandate as the Republicans did, and the whole house of cards that is the ACA is going to eventually fall.
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Making the whole situation even more awkward for congressional
Republicans is that the legal challenge is being pushed on the basis of
their 2017 tax bill that eliminated Obamacare’s individual mandate.
…
Well we know where their loyalties lie… reelection first, last and always. The health and well being of constituents is not a problem.
Who else needs health insurance anyway? They got theirs baked into their remuneration so it ain’t awkward anymore…
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This is what happens when telling lies, obfuscation, and being deplorable become normalized.
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Seems to me when folks realize they have no health insurance they will be asking questions. But by then it will be way too late and they will be screwed.
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If a majority of the Court becomes the Disciples of Scalia then the law of unintended consequences will result in judicial repudiation of the ACA.
Before Scalia’s tenure on the Supreme Court, most judges and lawyers casually assumed that when a court interprets a statute, its job is to implement “legislative intent.” Courts often paid more attention to statutory purpose and legislative history than to statutory text.
Scalia rebelled against these interpretive methods. He believed that when a court interprets a statute, the court’s job is to read the statutory text and do what it says. Even if what it says is stupid. Even if what it says is not what anybody intended. The text of a statute, Scalia believed, is the law.
Some GOP senators are now at odds with the ideology of their chosen Justices. As I said, it’s the law of unintended consequences. Or as @ANNFFL said at the top of this thread, they’re liars and idiots, too lazy and stupid to understand what they did.
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A major weakness in the DOJ position is that the constitutionality of ACA can not turn on the size of the tax (penalty). It’s set at zero today. next year, it could be $100 or $1000. The size of the tax (penalty) is not in the ACA - so the ACA still has the tax (penalty) provision which the Supreme Court used to uphold the ACA.
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That would seem to be a much more prudent response than the DoJs proposed remedy. Their legal theory is bullshit, but their proposed remedy doesn’t really follow from their own argument.
The DoJ is arguing that “the ACA was constitutional before, but setting the tax to zero renders it unconstitutional”. They then argue that Therefore, “the whole law should be thrown out” - as opposed to “the ACA can be made constitutional by reverting the tax to a non-zero number.”
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Feature or bug? With Barr at the head of an empty ‘Justice’ department, the concept of a unitary executive becomes that much more real. Democracy (or even a representative republic)? Not so much.
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LOL. Trump just pulled the election out from under his party. This is a twofer for Trump. He gets to hurt/scare people who need health ins to live and he gets to shaft his GOP enemies in congress. Fun times.
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NO. Some may have but it was not required.
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