When she was a law professor, Judge Amy Coney Barrett tried to puncture arguments favoring Obamacare. Now senators will probe how Barrett, as a Supreme Court justice, would rule on the decade-old health insurance overhaul.
CNN also found that opposition to overturning the law is nearly unanimous among Democrats (96%), and that most independents agree (62%). Conversely,73% of Republicans polled said the court should overturn the law. The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments on November 10 regarding whether the whole law should be tossed out. That could be just weeks after the full Senate has confirmed a new Justice Barrett. A group of Republican states led by Texas, and backed by the Trump administration, has asked the justices to invalidate the entire law, including provisions that expanded Medicaid to low-income adults, allowed children to remain on their parents‘ policies until age 26 and guaranteed coverage for people with pre-existing health conditions such as diabetes and cancer. Trump has opposed the law from its inception and derided the Supreme Court for upholding it. He had pressed Congress to throw out Obamacare to no avail. Now his administration is trying to do through litigation what it failed to accomplish legislatively. Trump’s third appointee to the nine-member high court could soon be in a pivotal role toward that effort. Barrett would succeed Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died on September 18 and who had consistently voted for the ACA. When the justices first rejected a challenge to the constitutionality of the 2012 law, liberal Ginsburg was part of the narrow 5-4 majority. So was conservative Chief Justice John Roberts. He cast the fifth vote, with four liberals, to uphold Obamacare, but only after construing a disputed provision requiring Americans to purchase health insurance to be valid under Congress‘ taxing power. Roberts‘ ruling has drawn the scorn of conservatives ever since. Barrett, then a University of Notre Dame law professor, wrote in a 2017 law review essay, „Chief Justice Roberts pushed the Affordable Care Act beyond its plausible meaning to save the statute. He construed the penalty imposed on those without health insurance as a tax, which permitted him to sustain the statute as a valid exercise of the taxing power.
