Of all the concerns Democrats have raised about Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court, perhaps the only one that rivals the threat she may pose to abortion rights is the threat she likely poses to the Affordable Care Act. Barrett has been a critic of Barack Obama’s landmark healthcare legislation, and if confirmed to the bench could potentially help Donald Trump and the GOP deliver a death blow to the policy — at the expense of the millions of Americans who rely on legislation and its protections for those with pre-existing conditions.
Republicans haven’t been bashful about their intentions when it comes to the ACA — but they are trying to cover up what destroying Obamacare would mean for Americans. Speaking virtually on the first day of Barrett’s hurried confirmation proceedings, Senator Ted Cruz on Monday suggested Democrats were fear-mongering in raising alarms about the threat to people with pre-existing conditions, lying that his party supports such protections, too. “They want this to be the central issue of the confirmation,” Cruz said. “Well, remember this: Every single member of the Senate agrees that preexisting conditions can and should be protected. Period. The end.”
“There is complete unanimity on this,” Cruz added.
The claim is as false coming from Cruz’s mouth as it is coming out of Trump’s. Republicans have been trying for a decade now to overturn Obamacare, despite the fact that they have no real idea what they’d replace it with. Their most reckless effort — the so-called “skinny repeal” — failed in 2017 after Senators Susan Collins and Lisa Murkowski broke ranks and John McCain delivered a dramatic, 11th-hour thumbs down on the Senate floor. Trump has never forgiven the late McCain for the act, and has continued to target Obamacare, promising to replace it with a “phenomenal” plan that never seems to materialize. Indeed, the president promises he will “very strongly” protect Americans with underlying health conditions. But when he’s asked how he’ll do that, he’s demurred. In July, he promised Fox News’s Chris Wallace a “full and complete” health plan in two weeks. Then the deadline was moved to mid-August, or maybe early September. Now it’s mid-October, three weeks out from Election Day, and he’s still got nothing. Looming on the horizon: a pair of ACA cases due before the Supreme Court the week after the election.
Cruz’s lie Monday that his party has worked to protect those with pre-existing conditions is particularly galling, given it came with a jab against Democratic filibusters; this is, after all, the same guy who read Green Eggs and Ham during a 21-hour filibuster in 2013 over the ACA and led the charge on that year’s two-week government shutdown. But Republican politics in 2020 depend on Americans forgetting the Republican politics of the last 10 years. They say they want to protect pre-existing conditions, hoping voters forget all the times they tried to gut those very protections. They want to decry Democratic stonewalling, hoping Americans forget their own obstructive politics. They want to fill Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s vacant seat on the high court in the final three weeks of the 2020 election, hoping their refusal to grant Merrick Garland a hearing nine months before the 2016 election has faded from the nation’s memory. “We are politicizing the courts,” Republican Senator Ben Sasse said Monday, scolding Democrats, “and that is wrong.”
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