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While the Senate Judiciary Committee, with its Republican majority, prepares to rubber stamp popular vote loser Donald Trump's Supreme Court choice of Brett Kavanaugh, a bogus legal case that he could ultimately decide is beginning in a federal courtroom in Texas. It's a case so ridiculous that even Republicans—with the exception of the Trump administration—have distanced themselves from it.
Twenty Republican states, and the Trump Justice Department, are asking the court to invalidate the Affordable Care Act on the flimsy basis that Congress has repealed the law's individual mandate which means the rest of the law should go, including all of the protections the law established to guarantee access to health insurance.
The case was brought in Texas, where the challengers knew they'd have a good chance of getting a friendly judge, and they did: Reed O’Connor, a George W. Bush nominee. O'Connor has been to the Obamacare challenge rodeo before, when in 2016 he blocked the Obama administration's rule preventing healthcare providers from refusing to treat transgendered patients based on religious objections.
While the Justice Department is making precedent by refusing to defend the law, it will be represented in court by a legal team headed up by California's Attorney General Xavier Becerra, along with 15 other Democratic states attorneys general.
This is a case that Republicans really don't want to be moving forward weeks before the midterm election in which health care is at the top of voter's worries and with a Trump Supreme Court justice pending. The ceaseless attacks on the law, the failed repeal, the repeal of the individual mandate, and Trump's ongoing sabotage has voters on edge. And it has Republicans on the wrong side, bigly.
The latest polling from the Kaiser Family Foundation finds that 90 PERCENT of voters say it's important that the ACA's pre-existing condition protections remain law, that includes 75 percent who say it's "very important."
Ninety. Percent. So, yeah, there's good reason for Republicans to be sweating the election. That's not going to stop them from ramming Brett Kavanaugh through, however, even though at this point it's very likely this case comes to the Supreme Court. Even though it's very likely this man would happily throw the law out the window.
Seems like that's something Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Susan Collins (R-ME), who went out on a limb with their leadership to save the law last year, would be worried about when they vote on this nomination.