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[Thread] BREAKING: The biggest health care news of the year.
The Trump DOJ tonight just told the courts to dismantle pre-existing conditions protections and other consumer protections.
This may seem predictable, but these actions are unprecedented.
The DOJ, responsible for upholding the rule of law, is not defending the people in a frivolous lawsuit to say that wi5out the mandate, the rest of the ACA can’t be enforced.
This collusion between the conservative plaintiffs and the “defense” would make pre-ex protections and age rating protections unconstitutional.
[Thread] Here's the brief. As expected. The Justice Department believes the crucial insurance reforms of the Affordable Care Act are unconstitutional and will not defend them. This is an enormous blow to the integrity of DOJ. https://www.justsecurity.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/ACA.Azar_.filing.pdf
The Justice Department doesn't think an injunction is immediately warranted. But on no uncertain terms, it argues that the federal courts should invalidate the crucial operative provisions of the ACA.
I am at a loss for words to explain how big of a deal this is. The Justice Department has a durable, longstanding, bipartisan commitment to defending the law when non-frivolous arguments can be made in its defense. This brief torches that commitment.
Pick your adjective. The arguments that the plaintiffs have offered in favor of their argument that the penalty-free mandate requires striking down the whole statute are silly. Laughable. Ridiculous. Unprincipled. And yet --
In a new book, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Jon Meacham reminds readers of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s belief that for all of this country’s failings, the trend of American civilization is forever upward. That is an invaluable reminder during a time when the president proclaims his power unrestrained by Madisonian checks and balances, including ignoring federal subpoenas, killing Justice Department investigations, obstructing justice to protect his personal interests and even pardoning himself. The president’s hapless lawyers seem to have convinced Donald Trump, like Richard M. Nixon before him, that “when the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”
But that twisted interpretation of presidential authority is dead wrong. Even in President Trump’s America, no man is above the law.
It may come as little relief to those unsettled by the commander in chief’s autocratic impulses that this president will likely face the same fate as Nixon if he acts upon his lawyers’ ignorant legal opinions. But perhaps take comfort from Meacham’s insight in “The Soul of America” that “to know what has come before is to be armed against despair.”
History does, in fact, show that a president cannot pardon himself. Days before Nixon resigned in 1974, the Justice Department issued an opinion that echoed centuries of American and English law by declaring, “Under the fundamental rule that no one may be a judge in his own case, the president cannot pardon himself.“
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