Let’s see. There’s an epidemic disease spreading around the globe—which, as anyone who owns a globe can tell you, includes the United States of America, Donald J. Trump presiding*. The primary issue among the remaining Democratic presidential candidates is how best to get the country to universal healthcare. So what better time could there be for the Supreme Court to again involve itself with the Affordable Care Act? Those people, like Joe Biden, who argue for building on the ACA have to confront again the possibility that, one day, there will be no ACA upon which to build.

This time, though, the Court has agreed to decide on an attempt by Democratic governors and House members to save the law from a radical decision handed down by a lower court. From the Washington Post:

The House and Democratic-led states asked the court to review a decision last year by a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit. Hearing a challenge from Texas and other Republican-led states and backed by the Trump administration, the panel struck down the law’s mandate that individuals buy health insurance but sent back to a lower court the question of whether the rest of the statute can stand without it. The lower court had said the entire law must fall.

The House told the Supreme Court that the 5th Circuit decision “poses a severe, immediate, and ongoing threat to the orderly operation of healthcare markets throughout the country, casts considerable doubt over whether millions of individuals will continue to be able to afford vitally important care, and leaves a critical sector of the nation’s economy in unacceptable limbo.” The House and Democratic states also have been eager to get the issue before the Supreme Court because the majority that has upheld the ACA in two previous challenges remains.

The Court carefully arranged things so that any decision cannot be handed down until after the November election. Still, depending on the Roberts-Gorsuch-Kavanaugh majority to overturn a lower-court decision that gives conservatives almost everything they want on the issue seems to be a thin reed on which to hang any hopes. The statistics of what will happen if the Court gives the administration* everything it wants remain terrifying—Charles Gaba has the details in his corner of the electric Twitter machine—and the thought of this administration* trying to cobble together a healthcare plan in the middle of cobbling together a response to a worldwide pandemic just makes my brain hurt.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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