If you're keeping up with the first day of this week's Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Judge Amy Coney Barrett, either on television or through the Townhall live blog, you've noticed Democrats are zeroed in Obamacare. They're using healthcare as a scare tactic to argue Judge Barrett should not be confirmed. They're offering many emotional stories about the legislation, but no constitutional arguments about why it should stand Supreme Court scrutiny.
America is worried about one thing above all else right now: our health.
— Sheldon Whitehouse (@SenWhitehouse) October 12, 2020
The irony is that this slapdash hearing targets the Affordable Care Act.
This Supreme Court nominee has signaled that she believes the Affordable Care Act must go. #WhatsAtStake pic.twitter.com/D0USuIRTi9
But as Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell pointed out in September, Democrats have used the issue of healthcare as a political weapon against conservative Supreme Court nominees for decades.
“One of the pre-selected scare tactics is that Judge Barrett is out to steal Americans’ healthcare coverage. That’s the claim: This mother of seven, including multiple children who were born or adopted facing pre-existing medical challenges, is just itching to block families like hers from accessing medical care. What a joke," McConnell said from the Senate floor on September 20. "When Senate Democrats were trying to attack Chief Justice John Roberts, long before Obamacare even existed, they claimed he’d sought to ‘put millions of American consumers and families at risk of losing coverage.’ They’ve been recycling these same attacks since before they even passed the law they now say they’re worried about. On this occasion, their entire argument seems to come down to a technical analysis Judge Barrett put forward in a four-year-old academic paper about one part of Obamacare — which Congress has already zeroed out in the meantime. These hysterical claims collapse under the slightest examination."
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Further, evidence shows Barrett would likely vote to uphold what's left of Obamacare after the individual mandate was struck down.
Judge Amy Coney Barrett, President Trump’s nominee to the Supreme Court, has already weighed in on one of the most significant and controversial cases it is scheduled to consider this fall — albeit in a mock exercise. And, contrary to what many Democrats fear, her position on the moot court that considered the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, went mostly against the Trump administration’s stance.
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