Trump Admin, State GOP Officials Urge Conservative Supreme Court To Ax Obamacare
A week after the 2020 election, Republican elected officials and the Trump administration are advancing their latest arguments to get rid of the Affordable Care Act.
In arguments scheduled for Tuesday, the Supreme Court will hear its third major fight over the 10-year-old law, popularly known as “Obamacare.”
Republican attorneys general in 18 states and the administration want the whole law to be struck down.
California is leading a group of Democratic-controlled states that is urging the court to leave the law in place.
The case comes to a court that now has three justices appointed by President Donald Trump: Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, who joined the court late last month to replace the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg.
The three Trump appointees have never ruled on the substance of the health care law.
The case turns on a change made by the Republican-controlled Congress in 2017 that eliminated the penalty for not having health insurance. Without the penalty, the law’s mandate to have health insurance is unconstitutional, the GOP-led states argue.
If the mandate goes, they say, the rest of the law should go with it because the mandate was central to Obamacare’s passage.
The argument could well turn on the legal doctrine of severability, the idea that the court can excise a problematic provision from a law and allow the rest of it to remain in force. The justices have done just that in other rulings in recent years.
In the first big Obamacare case in 2012, Justices Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas voted to strike down the whole law.
Justices John Roberts, Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor have voted to uphold it.
A decision is expected by late spring.
The Western Journal has reviewed this Associated Press story and may have altered it prior to publication to ensure that it meets our editorial standards.
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