According to a new poll by the Kaiser Family Foundation, only 27 percent of the public agrees with the Republican leaders’ strategy to take health care away from millions of Americans if they get an assist from the Supreme Court.
Last month, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) admitted that he would not succeed in repealing the Affordable Care Act so long as President Obama remains in the White House — “[Obamacare] bears the President’s name, the chances of his signing a full repeal are pretty limited.” Nevertheless, McConnell believes that he has an ace in the hole. “Who may ultimately take [Obamacare] down, he told a conference sponsored by the Wall Street Journal, “is the Supreme Court of the United States.” If the Court, which is dominated by Republicans, were to decide a case called King v. Burwell the way McConnell hopes they will, that would be “a major do-over of the whole thing, that opportunity presented to us by the Supreme Court as opposed to getting the President to sign a full repeal which is not likely to happen.”
McConnell’s views were echoed by two of the GOP’s other top leaders in Congress. Senate Majority Whip John Cornyn (R-TX) said that he expects “that the Supreme Court is going to render a body blow to Obamacare from which I don’t think it will ever recover.” Last July, when two Republican judges on a lower court tried to gut a key provision of the Affordable Care Act in a case similar to King, House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) claimed that this decision was “further proof that President Obama’s health care law is completely unworkable. It cannot be fixed.”
In reality, Congress is fully empowered to “fix” a law that the Supreme Court breaks by misinterpreting it. The plaintiffs in King ask the Supreme Court to misread the Affordable Care Act in order to deny tax credits that help consumers pay for health insurance in most states. Should these plaintiffs prevail, at least 8 million people are likely to lose health coverage. Thousands are likely to die. Yet, because King asks the Court to misread an act of Congress, it would actually be quite easy to “fix” the law should the Court decide to gut it — Congress could simply enact another law restoring the Affordable Care Act’s original meaning (although it remains an open question whether a Court that was sufficiently partisan to accept the weak legal arguments offered by the plaintiffs in King would simply find another excuse to gut the law).
Nevertheless, McConnell, Cornyn and Boehner’s statements leave little doubt that, whatever Congress is capable of doing to save the many lives endangered by King, Republican leaders have no interest in actually doing so.
According to the Kaiser poll, nearly two thirds of the nation disagrees with the GOP leaders’ strategy. That is, if the Republican-controlled Supreme Court takes health care away from millions of people, Republicans in Congress should cooperate with President Obama to restore what the justices took away:
The same poll determined that “[m]ost see lawmakers’ proposals to change the ACA as an attempt to gain political advantage (63%) rather than to improve the law itself (29%).”