Kill Obamacare? Trump voters won't care. But we will—in 2020

No doubt you’ve heard about Donald Trump’s latest move in his series of vindictive acts against President Obama: a new attempt to overturn the Affordable Care Act.

Seemingly out of the blue and against the advice of his own attorney general and Health and Human Services secretary, the Trump administration now says it will back a federal judge's ruling on a lawsuit filed by 20 GOP-led states that the entire ACA is unconstitutional and should be thrown out. The announcement came in the form of a short letter from three Justice Department lawyers to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, which is now considering the case after a conservative, GOP-appointed judge in Texas made the original ruling in December 2018.

Never mind the fact that the ACA has been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court. The votes of Trump’s two appointees, Justices Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh, would merely be trades for two justices who voted to kill the ACA and who are no longer on the court, the late Antonin Scalia and the retired Anthony Kennedy. There’s little reason to believe that Chief Justice John Roberts would change his vote if and when it reaches that stage again, even if the absence of the health insurance mandate changes the tax issue.

As many pundits and just about every Democrat has pointed out (gleefully), by putting ACA repeal back on the table, especially with no substitute, Trump has handed Democrats a winning issue in 2020. Guess that’s what happens when you go golfing and listen to Lindsey Graham, who apparently sold him on the idea during a lazy weekend at Mar-a-Lago.

The Donald Trump of March 2019 apparently has forgotten the words of the Donald Trump of two years earlier, who famously (and ignorantly) said, “No one knew health care could be so complicated.” Now he claims "I understand health care now, especially, very well.”

Better access to health care consistently polled as the No. 1 issue for Democratic voters in 2018, especially when it came to continued coverage of pre-existing conditions. That was true across the board, and specifically in possible swing states such as Nevada and Florida. Health care ranked lower, however, with Republican voters, who are still stuck on immigration as their No. 1 concern.

In the never-ending series of ridiculous Trump tweets, Trump thinks he can make people believe that the GOP will now be “The Party of Healthcare!” To say this was a dumb political move on Trump’s part is putting it mildly, even as White House aides try to spin the move as a “branding exercise.”

But in the end, Trump voters won’t care. They’ll vote for him anyway.

from Daily Kos https://ift.tt/2TNMCPs