.MaddowBlog: Supreme Court sets stage for historic ACA showdown (again)
The hope among health care advocates was that the 5th Circuit would hear the appeal, overturn the nonsensical district court ruling, and the matter would be put to rest.: late last year, a three-judge appellate panel -- one nominated by Donald Trump, the other by George W. Bush -- ruled that the ACA's individual mandate is unconstitutional and sent the case back to the lower court.
In effect, the 5th Circuit tasked O'Connor, the far-right judge whose ruling was widely panned, to reconsider the case after they rejected the ACA's individual mandate. The point, evidently, was for him to evaluate whether elements of the law could remain intact, or whether the entirety of the ACA system -- every benefit, every protection, every safeguard, etc. -- should be destroyed.
Now that the Supreme Court has taken up the case, we won't have to wait for a lengthy appellate process to unfold. We will, however, almost certainly have to wait until after the 2020 elections, which is what Republicans hoped for: if conservative justices were to gut the health security of tens of millions of Americans, shortly before voters went to the polls, GOP candidates would face an immediate political crisis.
As for the threat many families are now facing, it's worth noting for context that the last time the Supreme Court considered the legality of"Obamacare," the reform law prevailed in a 6-3 ruling. Of the six justices in the majority -- Roberts, Kennedy, Ginsburg, Breyer, Kagan, and Sotomayor -- five are still on the nine-member bench.
That said, the high court is sometimes unpredictable, and it wouldn't take much of a shift for the justices to tear down the nation's health care system.
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