Editors at Issues and Insights probe a Democratic angle of attack against Supreme Court nominee Judge Amy Coney Barrett.
Apparently unable to come up with any alleged high school hijinks or embarrassing yearbook captions, Democrats have decided to make Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination all about Obamacare. Good luck with that.
It didn’t take long for Democrats to settle on their messaging plan for Barrett’s confirmation. If confirmed by the Senate, she will cast the deciding vote to overturn Obamacare, they say.
“It’s no mystery about what’s happening here. President Trump was trying to throw out the Affordable Care Act,” Joe “Big F-ing Deal” Biden said over the weekend. “The Republican Party has been trying to eliminate it for a decade. Twice already, the Supreme Court has upheld that law.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told his colleagues “We must focus like a laser on health care because Judge Barrett’s record is so clear on this issue.” He claimed in a press release that a vote for Barrett “is a vote to eliminate health care for millions.”
Democrats point to Barrett’s criticism of Chief Justice John Roberts’ 2012 ruling on Obamacare, in which she correctly characterized what he did by saying he “pushed the Affordable Care Act beyond its plausible meaning to save the statute.”
For those who don’t remember, Roberts ruled that the federal government had no right ordering Americans to buy insurance, but then essentially rewrote the law to claim that what Obamacare was doing was simply taxing people who didn’t buy government-approved plans.
“Had he treated the payment as the statute did — as a penalty — he would have had to invalidate the statute as lying beyond Congress’s commerce power,” Barrett wrote in a 2017 Notre Dame University Law Review.
But the idea that Barrett’s confirmation will guarantee Obamacare’s demise is fatuous.