There was a reason that Republican states suing to destroy the Affordable Care Act didn't want the Supreme Court to make an expedited ruling on it, before this year's election. That's because even while they're pursuing this project to take health care away from millions of people and totally upend the system, they know that it could destroy them in November. They caught one break in that the court will hear the case this year but won't issue a decision until next year. But that doesn't mean that the case, and the issue of health care, won't dominate the 2020 election. The October surprise, in fact, could be the arguments in the case. It also opens up the issue of the Supreme Court itself, putting Senate races front and center.
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In fact, the Democratic state attorneys general and House Democrats who are defending the law had asked the court for a ruling this year, and are that confident in public opinion. They still are. California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who is leading the defense, said in a statement Monday, "As Texas and the Trump Administration fight to disrupt our healthcare system and the coverage that millions of people rely upon, we look forward to making our case in defense of the ACA. American lives depend upon it." That lives depend on it is going to be highlighted by the ability of the Trump administration to respond to the COVID-19 crisis at the same time that it's trying to take health care away from millions of people.
That's just one of the arguments for Democrats to run on in 2020. They still have the argument they've had for the whole decade since the law passed, a full decade in which Republicans have held vote after vote to repeal the law while saying they'll have a plan to replace it, a promise they have not fulfilled and one that they cannot. For two years, 2017-2018, they held the House, the Senate, and the White House and ultimately could not repeal the law because they could not come up with a plan to replace it. The massive public backlash against them while they were trying to repeal the law saved it. The election of a Democratic House in 2018 sealed it. This case will put the House out of reach for Republicans in 2020, and make defending the Senate that much harder.
That's in huge part because of the conservative activist judiciary that Trump and Mitch McConnell have created. This case was bogus from the beginning, and even conservative legal scholars admitted that. It's only getting to the Supreme Court because of activist conservative judges, and installing even more activist conservative judges has been the only thing that McConnell's Senate has achieved since Trump got in. That's profoundly dangerous on so many levels, starting at this very basic one—access to health care for millions of people. Add in access to reproductive health care, abortion, and even contraception (yeah, those are fights this spring in the Supreme Court). Add in voting rights, and LGBTQ rights, and clean air and water, and a fighting chance for mere humans against behemoth corporations. This one case that the Supreme Court is likely to be arguing in October opens up that discussion for Democratic Senate candidates.
Then there's the presidential election and who you trust to have in the White House—the guy who has his Justice Department arguing before the Supreme Court that the government expanding health care is unconstitutional, or the Democrat who wants to expand it further? Yes, there was a big reason for Republicans to want this put off until after the election. Health care was always going to be an issue, but now it's even more salient.