Biden’s Claim That Amy Coney Barrett Wants To Nix The Affordable Care Act is False
Michael Cantrell
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Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden has falsely claimed that Judge Amy Coney Barrett, who is President Donald Trump’s pick to fill the SCOTUS seat left vacant by the passing of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, wanted to get rid of the Affordable Care Act.
The Senate Judiciary Committee is now in the process of holding Barrett’s confirmation hearing. While this has officially kicked off now, the former vice president took a question asked about the current nominee and flipped into something that focused on what might happen to Obamacare if she should be confirmed to the bench.
Biden, a former chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee who is familiar with Supreme Court confirmation battles, misrepresented Barrett’s previous statements on the matter.
“This nominee has said she wants to get rid of the Affordable Care Act — this president wants to get rid of the Affordable Care Act. Let’s keep our eye on the ball. This is about less than one month [in which] Americans are going to lose their health insurance,” Biden told reporters before flying to Ohio on Monday.
Barrett, formerly a law professor at the University of Notre Dame who was a law clerk for the late Justice Antonin Scalia, has criticized Supreme Court decisions that upheld the healthcare law, but she has not said that she wants to eliminate it.
In a 2017 law review essay, Barrett critiqued Chief Justice John Roberts’s opinion that upheld the Affordable Care Act on the basis of treating the penalty for not complying with the individual mandate as a tax.
“Chief Justice Roberts pushed the Affordable Care Act beyond its plausible meaning to save the statute. He construed the penalty imposed on those without health insurance as a tax, which permitted him to sustain the statute as a valid exercise of the taxing power,” Barrett stated in the published piece. “Had he treated the payment as the statute did — as a penalty — he would have had to invalidate the statute as lying beyond Congress’s commerce power.”
The individual mandate penalty for folks who didn’t buy health insurance was nixed as part of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.
Contrary to the nonsense being spewed forth by Biden, Barrett has stated that she doesn’t go into the process of making legal decisions with the intent of creating policy.
How refreshing is that to hear?
“The policy decisions and value judgments of government must be made by the political branches elected by and accountable to the people. The public should not expect courts to do so, and courts should not try,” she says in her opening remarks.
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