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The extent to which Brett Kavanaugh on the Supreme Court will destroy the Affordable Care Act is up for some debate among healthcare experts. It's entirely possible that he "doesn't necessarily mean a vote to end the GOP's perpetual punching bag," as the Washington Post's Colby Itkowitz posits. For example, Obamcare supporter and University of Michigan Law School professor Nicholas Bagley says that he doesn't think Kavanaugh will approach future challenges as "health-care cases," but rather he'll "view them through the constitutional lens he brings to his cases more generally."
Which amounts to basically a far-right partisan view of the role of government in regulating health care and the power of the executive as opposed to the Congress and even the courts. For example, in a previous Obamacare case, he argued in dissent that the president has the power to determine if a law or part of it is unconstitutional, no matter what the courts have decided. So Kavanaugh might not set out on a mission to explicitly destroy Obamacare, but his motivations don't really matter.
Whether it's hatred for that law or an extremist bent in his judicial reasoning, the outcome will be the same. Things like protections for people with pre-existing conditions would be out the window. That's where the threat of Kavanaugh comes in. Abbe Gluck, a Yale law professor, pinpoints that when she "predicts there will be cases that accuse the Trump administration of sabotaging the ACA, which she says violates the Article II of the Constitution or the "Take Care Clause," which requires the president to act in good faith to enforce laws. Given his record, "one could surmise that he'd find reasons for the actions Trump has taken to weaken the ACA via regulations."
And there will be challenges coming up, which Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT) so helpfully tells us.
It's helpful because it really cements the concerns that red-state Democrats like Joe Manchin and Joe Donnelly, up for re-election this year, have said they're focusing on in assessing the nomination. It also puts more pressure on Republicans Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski, who have staked their reputations on resisting Trump on healthcare sabotage. So thanks, Hatch, for saying what was supposed to be the quiet part out loud.