Barr's worst move had nothing to do with Mueller

By Catherine Rampell

The Washington Post

The worst thing that Attorney General William Barr did this week arguably had nothing to do with possible contempt of Congress or the Mueller report.

It had to do with health care.

On Wednesday, amid the circus over alleged special counsel snittiness, the department that Barr oversees formally asked a federal appeals court to strike down the entire Affordable Care Act, jeopardizing access to health care for tens of millions of Americans.

If the Trump administration prevails, everything in the law would be wiped out. And I do mean everything: the protections for people with pre-existing conditions, Medicaid expansion, income-based individual-market subsidies, provisions allowing children to remain on their parents’ insurance until age 26, requirements that insurance cover minimum essential benefits such as prescriptions and preventive care, and so on.

The administration’s rationale was laid out in a policy brief supporting a lawsuit challenging Obamacare by 20 red states. Their logic: When Congress, as part of President Trump’s 2017 tax cuts, set the penalty for not carrying health insurance to zero, that effectively made it no longer really a “tax,” and therefore made it unconstitutional. Somehow, that rendered the rest of the law unconstitutional, as well; including lots of provisions having nothing to do with the mandate.

This reasoning has been rejected even by conservative legal scholars otherwise opposed to the law. But legal merits (and demerits) aside — which are likely to be ultimately adjudicated by the Supreme Court — it’s also not clear what political upside Republicans could possibly see in mounting yet another overt attack on Obamacare.

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https://www.heraldnet.com/opinion/rampell-barrs-worst-move-had-nothing-to-do-with-mueller/