On Monday, the Department of Justice announced that it wasn't going to defend the Affordable Care Act in court anymore. On a day dominated by news coverage of DOJ attorney general Bill Barr's four-page interpretation of the Mueller report, it seemed mighty strange for the department to pivot to attacking health-care protections, a major driver of Democrats' taking back of the House in last year's midterm elections. But here we are.

Under former attorney general Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, the DOJ argued that only some parts of the law, like protections for pre-existing conditions, should be struck down and the rest of it left intact.

Late last year, a federal judge made the controversial ruling that the Affordable Care Act is unconstitutional. The ruling sided with the claims of the plaintiffs, a coalition of Republican-controlled states led by Texas, that since Congress eliminated the individual mandate, which requires people to have some form of health insurance, the entire health-care law is invalid. (The law will remain intact through appeals.) As Vox reported at the time, a wide variety of legal scholars thought that the plaintiffs' arguments were "absurd."

On Monday, the DOJ notified the court that it is reversing its stance and siding with the district court judge in the Texas decision. Now, it wants the whole law scrapped.

The scale of this DOJ's decision could be absolutely massive. Since the Affordable Care Act passed, more than 20 million uninsured Americans have gotten coverage. And despite the administration's repeated vows to protect coverage for pre-existing conditions, this ruling overturns those protections.

What's amazing about this, beyond the sheer gall, is that from the outside it looks like a huge act of self-sabotage. Only 37 percent of adults have negative opinions of the ACA, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation, and 50 percent view it positively. Gallup polls found that more than 40 percent of voters in the 2018 midterms said health care was their top concern, and that it was a major factor for swing voters.

Reporter Steven Dennis at Bloomberg claims that based on conversations he's had with some senators, they would never have passed their tax overhaul, which killed the individual mandate, if they "knew the end result would have been total repeal of the ACA." Senator Susan Collins of Maine even defended her support of controversial Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanaugh by saying she was sure he would ultimately defend the health-care law.

Not even two weeks before the 2018 midterm elections, Trump tweeted, "Republicans will totally protect people with Pre-Existing Conditions, Democrats will not! Vote Republican." That failed to convince voters at the time. And it's going to be an even harder sell as we trudge on to 2020.