A rogue federal judge in Texas is trying to take down the ACA. Here's why he'll fail
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Even the Trump administration asked the Texas federal district court to wait until open enrollment’s cutoff before ruling on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act. Unfortunately, the judge hearing the case, though a George W. Bush appointee, isA rogue federal judge in Texas is trying to take down the ACA. Here's why he'll fail
Even the Trump administration asked the Texas federal district court to wait until open enrollment’s cutoff before ruling on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act. Unfortunately, the judge hearing the case, though a George W. Bush appointee, is just as hyper-partisan as any of President Trump’s picks. Judge Reed O’Connor issued a ruling declaringthe ACA as a whole to be unconstitutional one day before the Dec. 15 enrollment deadline. According to O’Connor, the Supreme Court found the ACA was unconstitutional in 2015, under the Interstate Commerce Clause, which permits the federal government to regulate commerce among and between states. Chief Justice John Roberts & Co. only let it stand because the individual mandate’s penalty could be read as an exercise of Congress’s Tax Power. Since Republicans struck that penalty in 2017, he reasons, the ACA is no longer constitutional. O’Connor was the choice of Bush, whose aggressively partisan judicial nominations paved the way for Trump’s. He has gone out of his way to rule against and normalize discrimination against LGBT people as a matter of “religious liberty.” O’Connor’s also ruled the Indian Child Welfare Act unconstitutional. (It’s not). Conservatives knew they could count on him. Even better, from their perspective, they knew that if they brought this case in the Northern District of Texas they could count on his being the one to hear the case—O’Connor is his district’s only active federal trial judge. He didn’t disappoint. He even dropped conservative buzzwords in his ruling referring to the health care fight as “inflaming emotions and testing civility.” Read more