Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, Judge Kavanaugh, is a threat to Americans’ health care. We know Kavanaugh will gut the Affordable Care Act because Trump himself pledged his Supreme Court nominee would “do the right thing” and strike it down, and because Kavanaugh wrote that a future president could refuse to enforce it.
Trump pledged that his Supreme Court nominee would “do the right thing” and gut the Affordable Care Act.
“If I win the presidency, my judicial appointments will do the right thing unlike Bush’s appointee John Roberts on Obamacare.” – Trump, 2015
Trump trashed a Supreme Court justice for voting to uphold the ACA.
“Remember, Cruz And Bush gave us Roberts who upheld #ObamaCare twice! I am the only one who will #MAKEAMERICAGREATAGAIN!” – Trump, 2016<
“Justice Roberts, everybody liked Justice Roberts, turned out to be a disaster because of Obamacare. He could have killed it twice, and he turned out to be a total disaster, so.” – Trump, 2016
Kavanaugh wrote that a future president could refuse to enforce the ACA, even if it had been upheld by the courts.
New Yorker: “Late last year, a three-judge panel of the D.C. Circuit voted, two to one, to uphold President Obama’s health-care reform, known as the Affordable Care Act (aca). Kavanaugh dissented, primarily on the ground that the lawsuit was premature. In a sixty-five-page opinion, Kavanaugh appeared to offer some advice to the Republicans who are challenging Obama in the election this year. ‘Under the Constitution,’ Kavanaugh wrote, ‘the President may decline to enforce a statute that regulates private individuals when the President deems the statute unconstitutional, even if a court has held or would hold the statute constitutional.’”
Kavanaugh dissented from a ruling to uphold the ACA’s birth control benefit.
National Review: “Those recent decisions are just the latest in a long, unbroken line of consistent decisions from Judge Kavanaugh on issues of religion and abortion. During the Obama administration, he voted in Priests for Life v. HHS to invalidate the so-called accommodation to the contraceptive mandate, which required religious organizations to sign a form facilitating access to contraceptives for their employees.”
The vast majority of Americans say it’s “very important” to protect the ACA’s protections for people with pre-existing conditions.
Kaiser Family Foundation: “Three-fourths of the public (76 percent) say it is ‘very important’ to them that the provision that prohibits health insurance companies from denying coverage because of a person’s medical history remains law. An additional fifteen percent say it is ‘somewhat important’ this provision remains law.”