Defenders of the Affordable Care Act may have in Justice Brett Kavanaugh a fifth vote to save the landmark health care law, which was in front of the Supreme Court for a third time Tuesday because of a lawsuit led by several red states.
As I read it Roberts questions why they should be expected to do what Congress would not.
And the other four think throwing people off insurance, and totally disrupting the entire US insurance market in the midst of a worldwide pandemic is a good idea?
A matter of Constitutional principle?
Punt, you idiots.
The Rapist is lying. They don’t want to give any signs of their intention to destroy Obamacare until after the Georgia Senate race is complete.
Roberts
You said it.
These federalist picks see their job as election engineering. Right now it’s all about the Georgia runoff in January.
What’ll ya bet they wait until after Georgia and then pull a switcheroo?
I would never read too much into an oral argument, but the pressure on the right wing judges to figure a way to save the basic framework of the law has to be overwhelming. A hundred million people or more have preexisting conditions. This is way past hurting poor people. This is about saving the Republican party from itself.
Unpopular opinion: repealing Obamacare is electorally useful because it stirs up the rubes, but because it’s a fairly moderate law in reality, it’s not necessarily going to gin up the blood of even the bad-faith actors on the Court. The worst-faith avenue, in any case, would be to preserve McConnell et al’s electoral cudgel.
I’m similarly not always sure conservative actors on the Court are sure they want to overturn Roe v. Wade. Better to nibble away at the practical implementation (e.g., I think Mississippi has exactly one clinic that offers the procedure) but keep the drooling hordes braying.
It would be irony on top of irony if the Federalist Society and Trump’s hand-picked Justice decides to save the law authored by the man Trump hates the most in this world.
Actually, though, Kavanaugh is doing the Republican’s (and secondarily, at best, the American people) a huge favor because I can’t imagine where we go with a recalcitrant GOP if it’s entirely repealed. It would be a tragedy of immense proportions, especially in the midst of a pandemic.
Wise.
At this point it’s not even clear that the Court will grant the plaintiffs standing.
Possible but not yet a sure thing.
I’m currently reading “The Dog That Caught the Car: Or How Two Runoff Elections in GA Will Decide the Fate of the Senate”, by Mitch McConnell.
The reviews are still out.
I’m going to go out on a limb here and say 7-2 with Thomas and Alito in the dissent.
I’m not making any predictions, but the reporting this morning also indicates that the standing problem has a lot of traction. You don’t even get to severability if the plaintiffs don’t have standing (because they have not suffered any injury from not having to pay any individual mandate taxes).
You never want to win a culture war. it is bad for business.
I was thinking that. The insurance companies would seem to be the injured party here. The individual mandate/more customers was the exchange for them not turning away those with pre-existing conditions. I don’t see them suing.
And Gorsuch, too, seems amenable to the whole pro-severability argument.
What? The other four think?
wait…but I thought the mandate was essential to making the ACA financially sound. It seems to me that excising it from the rest of the act would also be a step toward killing it.
You never want to kill your customers either but that hasn’t stopped the cigarette companies.