⚖️🏥 Let's do a MEGATHREAD while we wait for arguments to begin in the big GOP challenge to ObamaCare at SCOTUS, shall we? (you can listen to it on CSPAN at 10am, fyi) (1/x)
Three issues:
(1) standing,
(2) did the '17 Trump tax bill, which zeroed out the tax penalty for not buying health insurance, render the individual insurance mandate unconstitutional?
(3) if the individual mandate IS unconstitutional, must the entire ACA be struck down?(2/x
Let's deal with those in turn
(1) Standing — This is a question of whether a plaintiff has the right to sue. Among the various limits to this right is the Constitution's requirement that courts only hear "cases or controversies." More on that here—> law.cornell.edu/wex/standing
Per below, top Republicans don't actually believe the vote was subject to fraud but are pretending to for political expediency. They fear that saying Biden won will alienate Trump's base ahead of critical GA elections and cost GOP their Senate majority washex.am/35bemGB
⚖️Reminder: The Justice Department, on behalf of the Trump admin, will join a group of GOP states at the Supreme Court tomorrow to urge the 6-3 conservative court to strike down ObamaCare in its entirety
From a preview story I just filed:
The political ground has shifted at an astonishing rate since the justices agreed in March to take up this latest Republican challenge to the ACA. (2/3)
Since then, the country has gone from enjoying historically low jobless numbers and registering fewer than two dozen coronavirus cases, to seeing millions of newly unemployed Americans lose job-based health coverage and more than 10 million infections across the U.S. (3/3)
This rather chilling prediction comes from an email exchange I had in SEPTEMBER with a former top Pentagon official who served in high level govt roles in several previous admins:
“The period between November 3 and January 20 promises to be the most anarchic in our history...
...”Whatever the outcome is, it will be regarded by a significant portion of our population as illegitimate.”
⚠️This is why it’s important to push back against false allegations of widespread voter fraud
USPS sent the following: "The assumption that there are unaccounted ballots within the Postal Service network is inaccurate. These ballots were delivered in advance of the election deadlines. ...(1/4)
...We employed extraordinary measures to deliver ballots directly to local boards of elections. When this occurs, by design, these ballots bypass certain processing operations and do not receive a final scan. Instead, they are expedited directly to the boards of elections (2/4)
...We remain in close contact with state and local boards of elections and we do not currently have any open issues. Additionally, the Postal Inspection Service has physically inspected all plants that process ballots. (3/4)