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Bill Barr owns this cockamamie brief urging that the ACA be struck down — he caved when Trump ordered him to take a position that Barr knows is insane. 1/
Let’s recall that DOJ’s position at the district court level was *already* insane — as @isamuel and @leahlitman explained last June. 2/
takecareblog.com/blog/the-estab…
takecareblog.com/blog/the-estab…
At his confirmation hearing, Barr seemed to concede as much in response to Kamala Harris, suggesting that he was open to reversing DOJ’s position and defending the ACA. 3/
Here’s the video of the Barr-Harris exchange on the ACA, starting at 0:58. 4/
But instead of dialing back the crazy, Barr took it to 11 at Trump’s behest when DOJ announced that on appeal they would argue that the *entire* ACA must be struck down. 5/
Recall that DOJ was already arguing that the most important parts of the ACA should be struck down, so this escalation was only marginally more stupid. We mustn’t let their new position normalize their earlier one. 6/
Weirdly, the actual brief they filed yesterday takes a tiny and incoherent step back because DOJ belatedly realized that invalidating every single word of the ACA would imperil some prosecutions, as @nicholas_bagley suggests in this thread. 7/
Medicare defendants were seeing an opening. 8/
Testifying last month, Barr literally said that if the DOJ position is so bad then there’s nothing to worry about because it’ll lose in court. 9/
That’s a very, very odd thing for an Attorney General to say, an audible ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. 10/
On the Upper West Side of Manhattan, where Barr and I both grew up, we have a word for it: chutzpah. 11/end
