This is both radical and politically reckless. It’s also callous to a degree that’s hard to fathom.
The Trump administration said Thursday night that it will not defend the Affordable Care Act against the latest legal challenge to its constitutionality — a dramatic break from the executive branch’s tradition of arguing to uphold existing statutes and a land mine for health insurance changes the ACA brought about.
In a brief filed in a Texas federal court and an accompanying letter to the House and Senate leaders of both parties, the Justice Department agrees in large part with the 20 Republican-led states that brought the suit. They contend that the ACA provision requiring most Americans to carry health insurance soon will no longer be constitutional and that, as a result, consumer insurance protections under the law will not be valid, either.
The three-page letter from Attorney General Jeff Sessions begins by saying that Justice adopted its position “with the approval of the President of the United States.”
The single best thing the government has done in the last twenty years is to make it so people with pre-existing conditions can get affordable health insurance. If you’re not going to give everyone health care coverage, then you absolutely have to make it possible for people to afford treatment, and people with preexisting conditions cannot actuarily be insured at an affordable price.
This is important from a simple fairness point of view, and it’s a basic recognition of the worth and dignity of every human being. But with an opioid crisis roiling the nation, Obamacare has been the single biggest lifesaver we have. Addiction is a preexisting condition, and mental health is covered under the law more strongly than ever before. Without those insurance protections, treatment is going to be out of reach for the very socioeconomic classes that are being hardest hit by the epidemic. A lot of these people impacted are Trump voters, and he promised something a lot better than this. A few days ago, Reuters had a piece on this issue: Voters in opioid-plagued districts demand solutions from candidates.
Here’s an anecdotal story from that article:
Alexis Pleus thinks neither party has done enough to solve the [opioid] crisis, but says Democrats are right to push for more funding and for health insurance reform.
For her, the issue is personal. Her son, a restaurant chef, cycled in and out of jail and rehab before dying of an overdose in 2014. The last time he tried to get clean, Pleus said, he called her in tears to say his health insurance wouldn’t pay for a full course of treatment, and he would be turned out after 14 days.
“The system without a doubt failed him. He wasn’t refusing help, he was begging for help,” Pleus said.
That’s the situation people are facing with the protections of Obamacare. Voters are already pissed off that the government is not doing enough, but this move by the Trump administration is going to set people’s hair on fire.
It’s really, really, really bad politics for the Republicans, and I can’t say I am all comforted by that because we’re talking about people’s lives. And we’re talking about the lives of everyone with a preexisting condition, not just people with histories of addiction. We’re also talking about access to affordable health care for healthy people. Trump and the Republicans were probably at their lowest point in the polls when they were trying last year to toss more than twenty million people off their health care. Doing it this way isn’t going to be more popular.
Worse, the Department of Justice lawyers are arguing against established law. It’s stunningly inappropriate. So much so that three DOJ lawyers resigned from the case rather than have their names attached. From legal experts Ian Samuel and Leah Litman at Take Care:
Earlier today, the Justice Department filed a document in a case about the Affordable Care Act that was so radical, and so self-evidently without merit, that career lawyers in that agency would not sign their names to it. In fact, the document is such a transparent embarrassment that three career lawyers involved in the case withdrew their appearance before it was filed, presumably to avoid the taint of being listed on a docket where it appeared. Reading the filing is enough to explain why none of them could stomach it. The document is not so much a brief as the establishing shots of a heist. The damage it will do to the Department of Justice as an institution is hard to assess at this early date. But while we are not naïve enough to believe that these lawyers will endure the slightest sanction, social or professional for doing this, we are unable to resist a few remarks on their work product, such as it is.
The hate that emanates from this man is seeping into society. It is harming our people as sure as a war but quietly as if unnoticed. But we know it and our friends know it, and those who have felt it they surely know it. I can only pray sanity will rise once more.
The hate that emanates from this man is seeping into society.
Have you not learned yet? Trump is only a symptom. He’s only doing what any other GOPer would be doing as president. They all vote for his terrible policies. They all vote for his shitty, unqualified judges. The GOP needs to be crushed, continuously. Until then we’re screwed. Is the Democratic Party up to that task?
“Is the Democratic Party up to that task?”
We’re screwed.
Merely a symptom you say? He is the leader of the band. And they all follow his lead. He appears to really like Putin who challenges the West at every turn. And the really sad part is some part of the 63 million or so cheer for him whenever he is in town. I read his approval rating is improving. More suicide on the way, I suppose. And the Dems? Their approval ratings have been going down all year.
Vox noted that the dems had a whopping 18 point lead at the beginning of the year and now the guess is fifty fifty for the house and the senate is a tough lift. Are the dems up for the task? Let us hope. Without congress Fat Donnie goes through to 2024 and a few more supremes. Am I pessimistic? Hell no. But, do tell me, who we got leading us? Oh right we got the Better Deal and Chuck.
Oh bollocks to those poll numbers. Trump’s have been pretty stable since forever, bouncing around in a 5 point range. They should suck worse, but given the economy, it’s amazing they are as bad as they are.
It’s the same thing with the Dems. Yes, they were up 15 or whatever in January, but those were outlier polls. Look on 538, and you can the Dems with an average lead of 6-8 points pretty much all this year after January.
And if Trump ties the GOP with ditching pre-existing conditions, I expect those numbers to drop again to where they were during the health care repeal attempts, in the -8 to -12 pt range vs the Dems.
After his performance this morning, who can say? He sounds like a really stupid man. Blames Obama for Crimea.
From the standpoint of GOP leaders, the “beauty” of Trump’s innate stupidity and ignorance is an asset when it comes to playing to the base. Whereas a reasonably intelligent and empathetic person would have to work to get there, with Trump, dumbed down messaging comes off genuine and natural because he doesn’t have to play at it; he’s already there. This is why they love him so.
Trump is naturally hateful, embarrassingly stupid, but he’s cunning. He knows enough to weaponize and be dangerous with his stupidity and ignorance.
It is easy for us to see him as simply a stupid man, but as you say, he is cunning and he does things naturally for his base. We underestimated him once. I don’t want to do it again and hence, it worries me that the dem generic lead may be slipping or a source like VOX seems to think we could be headed for trouble. Also, I have not been blown away by what I see from the dems. Maybe just usual jitters, I sure hope.
I’m not a lawyer but is Jon Walker correct here?
Seems to be insinuating that if this were agreed upon virtually all of our laws would be null and void.
Of course it is illogically immoral. So is the caging of children without their parents at our southern borders. And then we have the G6+1 which is just downright destructive.
We can’t judge this administration by the same hopeful perspective as those who told us that Trump would turn Presidential once he took office.
This administration, this Rep Party only recognizes the power of threats and fear of power. Who among us is not unsettled at the idea of losing our health coverage just because we have a human condition? Who doesn’t picture their own children sitting behind those cages? Are we next?
The G6+1 (and Trump wants Russia back in of course) just might surprise even themselves and stand united against Trump’s bullying. They have every right to.
If people continue to cross the boarder at the current rate, how many children will be in the donald’s custody by the end of the year? The donald is going to do something very stupid when the number of children he must care for exceeds what has been planned. People crossing our southern boarder are desperate just like those who recently tried to cross the mediterranean to flee war.
To knowingly put access to health care out of reach for millions of people, under the guise of providing them “choice,” while simultaneously proposing hundreds of billions of dollars in cuts to medicare is not an improvement over the ACA. And the driver for this was not just to undercut an Obama accomplishment, but to find cuts to fund $2.3 trillion, yes trillion, on tax cuts. And it just blows my mind that you have people, not many, but enough, who are adversely affected by this and STILL think what’s being done is a good thing. Just blows my mind.
The Trump/GOP has made it plain: when it comes to what matters in your life, unless you are wealthy, we don’t care about you. And that includes Trump supporters.
Some of their brain-dead supporters may be, but by and large voters are not fooled:
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/video/constituent-loses-temper-rep-tom-macarthur-health-care-4733860
3
If the dems ran on, at best, a public option, and at worst, restoring what the republicans destroyed in the ACA, they could win in 2018 on it.
I hear this every day from people who should be screaming about it, but you know the debt, the debt is too high and we can’t afford it.
Pretty much every Dem running for office so far this cycle has focused their campaign on healthcare- how they will improve it and how the Republicans are trying to take it away.
. . . tutional . . . “
RE:
Feeling highly confident that the Constitution will not change in any timeframe reasonably modified by the adverb “soon”, I wondered “how the fuck does THAT work?” Under what bizarre circumstances does something that is currently constitutional “soon” become unconstitutional?
So I clicked the link and read evil racist Jefferson Beauregard III’s letter.
Bizarre circumstances indeed. The reasoning goes like this (disclaimer — I am not a lawyer; but this one seemed pretty clear to a reasonably-legally-knowledgeable layperson; actual lawyers invited to offer any needed corrections):
But what with the mandate, guaranteed issue, and community rating forming the core pillars of the ACA functioning sustainably, if courts eventually go along with JBIII’s argument, it’s hard to see any way this doesn’t outright kill it (as booman implied). “The rest” of the ACA, regardless how constitutional, can’t function without those 3 provisions.
I see no technical flaw in this reasoning (i.e., it looks evil, but arguably technically legally correct; but see previous disclaimer!), so this looks likely to succeed (at killing people, booman looks exactly right about that, too) if it lands in any Banana-Republican-appointee-majority court, including SCOTUS.
They are evil motherfuckers.
#4 is where the logic falls apart. Congress can certainly pass a mandate (with a tax as a penalty for non-compliance), and they can also pass a law that says that insurers cannot deny coverage for pre-existing conditions or charge higher rates for people with PECs. Those items are not inseparably linked such that invalidation of the mandate invalidates the others. (IMHO – and yes, IAAL.)
One other thought – courts hate (HATE) wasting their time issuing advisory opinions, which this suit is currently asking for. Until such time as the elimination of the tax penalty actually happens (2019), this suit is premature.
. . . supports (I think?) an afterthought I had after posting my comment above: I.e., but IS it somehow inherently unconstitutional for Congress to mandate something without providing any enforcement-mechanism “teeth”? (Another way of asking this might be: ‘But did Roberts’ opinion really say the mandate would be unconstitutional with NO enforcement mechanism, rather than the enforcement mechanism passing constitutional muster as a “tax”?’) No examples of them doing so come immediately to mind, but guessing some exist — and probably many such?
So you agree after all?
As I understand it every lawyer who has looked at the arguments presented by the DOJ considered them farcical and ridiculous.
Here’s one example.
A couple of astonishing facts from this case:
“…In an unusual filing just before 6 p.m. Thursday, when the brief was due, the three career Justice attorneys involved in the case — Joel McElvain, Eric Beckenhauer and Rebecca Kopplin — withdrew.”
The Attorney General’s letter to Speaker Ryan includes in its citations a letter from a DOJ official to Senator Orrin Hatch in 1996. That letter explained to Elder Orrin why the DOJ was refusing to defend the constitutionality of a morally and statutorily small section of the Defense authorization law passed that year, a section which proposed “…to require the Department of Defense to separate from the armed services most members of the armed forces who are HIV-positive.”
The Parties are not the same, and have not been the same at any moment of our lifetimes. Progressives who refuse to acknowledge this reality are poisonous to our movement.
Thanks for that video
She focuses on Trump maladmin lying about the effect (claimed positive, actually negative) of Trump’s tariffs (fair enough).
But what jumped out at me was digby apparently missing the Worse-Than-Useless Corporate Media’s (today, NYT) misplaced credulity to a false Trump maladmin claim:
Reality (click “10y” option to see 2008-20018): Trump hasn’t (so far) managed to wreck the Obama economy.
Neither digby nor NYT (nor, apparently, whatever “reporter” posed the question) challenged the bullshit bolded above. This is a problem.
In the moments of choosing during the 2016 election, an unfortunate number of community members came to this website to talk shit about the ACA. They often stood on wild misrepresentations of fact (“e.g. The entire law was based on the arch-conservative Heritage proposal from the early ’90’s”- WRONG) and nasty representations of the motivations of leading Democrats behind the law’s passage (“e.g. Obama is a corporatist who wanted to enrich the rich through the ACA’s passage”- WRONG).
The 2016 election was so razor-thin, every single fucking thing that happened which hurt Clinton/Democrats was part of the toxic brew. The bullshit conversations about the ACA which took place here were a microcosm of the conversations which were happening elsewhere. The health care platform Donald Trump ran on was obviously so much worse than the status quo. Fuck those community members for disrespecting Clinton’s proposals to improve the ACA and Trump’s shitty, shitty ideology and temperament.
I’ll never stop feeling white-hot hate for self-styled “truthtellers” and “progressives/liberals” who helped Donald Trump become President. Look at the totally insane and delusional press conference our President conducted as he left the G7 meeting this morning. Those “truthtellers” own a great part of this Presidency.
Propaganda, it’s a helluva drug.
I have been wanting to get rid of Devin Nunes and helped out with GOTV in the district for his Democratic opponent Andrew Janz.
In the June 5th primary, with absentee ballots still being counted, here is the current result:
Janz (D) – 30,141
Nunes (R) – 54,887
For those who voted for Nunes, it does not matter!