The GOP-led court challenges to Obamacare,
King v. Burwell, and President Obama's immigration actions,
Texas v. Johnson, have a lot in common,
notes attorney David Leopold.
They cover different issues, but their origins, goals, and strategies are the same: Republicans attempting to use the courts to further their anti-Obama political agenda, while simultaneously railing against politicization of the courts.
Consider the following: King was launched by the fiercely anti-Obama Competitive Enterprise Institute, using ordinary citizens as plaintiffs to achieve a result that’s adverse their economic interests. Texas vs. Johnson was launched by 26 fiercely anti-Obama Republicans leaders, using tax dollars to finance their political agenda, to achieve a goal that’s not their states’ interests economically, socially or culturally.
Leopold is right. Both cases are particularly bizarre in the sense that they advance a goal that comes to no good end for the plaintiffs involved in the case. Success in
King, means the plaintiffs will either pay more for their insurance coverage or go uninsured. Destroying Obamacare subsidies for federal exchanges
would result in a loss of insurance for about eight million people overall, not to mention $12 billion in uncompensated health care.
Undoing Obama's immigration actions will make the states bringing the suit less safe because Obama's new actions specifically funnel resources toward violent criminals and national security threats. It will also adversely affect the economy, according the White House Council of Economic Advisers.
First, executive action would, over the next 10 years, increase GDP by at least 0.4 percent ($90 billion) or as much as 0.9 percent ($210 billion), according to the White House Council of Economic Advisers (CEA). The CEA also estimates that the full package of executive actions would lead to a decrease in federal deficits of somewhere between $25 billion and $60 billion over the next 10 years. Second, executive action would expand the country’s tax base by billions of dollars over the next 10 years, according to the CEA.
But these bad outcomes don't seem to worry the conservatives pushing the cases. Hey, if you can't push your agenda through the Congress you control, why not turn to the very same "activist courts" you say you despise?