Remember the bad old days when Republicans equated Obamacare with “Armageddon,” called it a “train wreck,” predicted it was “destined to fail,” cheered on a president who vowed to “terminate it,” and basically spent an entire decade trying to kill the law in Congress and the courts? All because it was somehow a holy mission to cancel the health insurance that covers tens of millions of people?
So much losing! Because what was most delicious yesterday – after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld Obamacare for the third time – was the saboteurs’ thunderous silence. It was the sound of surrender. The Affordable Care Act, President Obama’s signature achievement, famously lauded by his veep Joe Biden as “a big f—–g deal,” has been inextricably woven into America’s safety net, it’s more popular than ever (53 percent favorable, only 35 percent unfavorable), and the message to Republicans is: Three strikes and yer out.
In 2012, the Supreme Court upheld the law by a vote of 5-4. In 2015, it upheld the law by a vote of 6-3. Yesterday, it upheld the law by a vote of 7-2. The issues at hand were different each time (indeed, the latest ruling was quite narrow), but methinks there’s a trend here. And best of all yesterday was the news that two Trump appointees, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett, had joined the Obamacare majority, thus serving a definitive poop sandwich to the exile in Mar-a-Lago – and preserving the preserving the insurance that now covers a record 31 million Americans.
The GOP’s desperate last gasp – proving yet again that cruelty and stupidity are the cult’s preexisting conditions – was the lawsuit ginned up by 18 red states (led by Texas, natch) to kill the law forever. That’s what the Supreme Court rejected yesterday. Here’s the background, distilled to its essence:
In 2017, the Republican Congress erased an Obamacare provision known as the individual mandate penalty. Obamacare required Americans to pay a penalty if they refused health coverage; the Republicans reduced that penalty to zero. They did not abolish the penalty provision per se; they just neutered it. The 18 red states pounced on that, contending that because Congress had neutered the penalty, it meant that the entire law had to be unconstitutional.
That was nonsensical; according to traditional (i.e. conservative) legal doctrine, courts can’t blow away an entire law when Congress takes aim at only one provision. Even the right-wing Wall Street Journal editorial page said that judges can’t kill laws “by fiat,” especially not when “millions of people now rely on Obamacare’s subsidies.” But, naturally, Donald Trump loved the lawsuit and it was game on.
Anyway – long story short – the Supreme Court yesterday treated the lawsuit with all the respect one typically gives to a tatter of toilet paper trailing from one’s shoe. The gist of the decision – the majority was joined by the likes of Clarence Thomas! – was that the 18 red states had no “standing” to even sue. To have “standing,” the plaintiffs had to prove that Obamacare had injured them in some way. They proved zilch. End of case.
Most noteworthy of all is that the Republicans who were fueled for so long by Obamacare-hatred reacted to the court ruling with zipped lips. They’ve apparently gotten the message – finally – that their cynical game is over. Heck, they lost the House in 2018 and the White House in 2020 in part because their hostility to the ACA provoked a voter backlash. And President Biden’s pandemic rescue plan, enacted earlier this year, has already buttressed the law – with higher subsidies for people who buy coverage through the ACA exchanges, and with brand new subsidies for people who weren’t eligible before.
Yeah, some “train wreck.” In reality, the ACA train has already left the station, and Republicans, by dint of their current silence, seem to realize that they’ve been left on the platform. Perhaps now both parties can get down to the serious business of making Obamacare work better – while addressing the persistent flaws in a health care system that still leaves one in 10 Americans uninsured, and forces us to spend far more on health care than other western nations.
That, however, would require a renewed Republican commitment to the difficult art of governance. But we can always dream.