Joe Biden lays it out for you

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In perhaps the most compelling speech of his career, Joe Biden laid bare the president’s goal. “In the middle of the worst global health crisis in living memory, Donald Trump is before the Supreme Court trying to strip health-care coverage away from tens of millions of families.”

Rather than fighting to save Americans from disease, Trump is fighting to take away health care from Americans. The Affordable Care Act (ACA, or “ObamaCare”) is on the next Supreme Court docket, and Trump has spent his entire presidency trying to strike it down.

The fight is on

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In 2016, with nearly a year of Barrack Obama’s presidency remaining, McConnell blocked any Obama nominee, claiming that “voters should have a say” in the next Supreme Court nominee. Now, with voting already underway, McConnell has stopped pretending he cares about voters’ opinions and is already vowing to push a new conservative justice through.

Democratic lawmakers must use any legal means at their disposal hold back this hypocritical push for a nominee less than two months before Election Day. If they succeed, that gives voters time not just to elect a different president, but crucially, a majority Democratic Senate to restore the normal nomination process for Supreme Court justices.

Electing a Democratic President and Democratic majority Senate will allow voters to send a clear message about who they want on the nation’s highest court. Joe Biden and a Democratic-controlled Senate would have a chance to install a justice that would balance out the reliably conservative and liberal sides of the Supreme Court.

No more sober decider

The Trump administration under William Barr has taken on the unprecedented role of attacking the US government’s own laws. This leaves it to Democratic lawyers to argue in support of the ACA. And while Chief Justice Roberts’s vote previously upheld the ACA, without RBG, John Roberts can’t play the role of the sober decider.

The Supreme Court has the option of delaying the argument on the Affordable Care Act (ACA), which is currently scheduled six days after the national election. If they were to hear it on schedule, with eight justices, the best people who rely on ACA health care could hope for would be a tie. And if Trump has another Justice on the bench by then, the ACA will likely be killed.

No more ACA. With no new health care plan on the horizon.

Repeal health care without replacement

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One of Trump’s main campaign promises was to “repeal and replace” the ACA “on day one.” He bragged about “great health care at a tiny fraction of the cost. And it’s going to be so easy.” Then-candidate Trump promised, “We will do it and we will do it very, very quickly,” predicting, “much better healthcare!”

In reality, the Trump administration has failed to put forward any health care plan at all, and his full-frontal assault on the ACA failed. Now the president’s dreams of showing up Obama’s signature achievement have devolved into a series of scrappy, piecemeal attacks that now hinge on a single Supreme Court argument.

Joe Biden plus a Democratic Senate can save your AFFORDABLE HEALTH CARE

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The ACA did not just secure care for those with pre-existing conditions, it also created health care in a way that kept people from going bankrupt. Trump is attacking both the “affordability” and the “care” itself.

Former Vice President Biden explained, “Insurers could once again discriminate or drop coverage completely for people living with preexisting conditions like asthma, diabetes, cancer and so many other problems.” This means “If Donald Trump has his way, the complications from COVID-19 … like lung scarring and heart damage, could become the next deniable preexisting condition.”

A president for the whole country

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“We can’t keep rewriting history, scrambling norms, ignoring our cherished system of checks and balances,” Biden said. “We are the United States of America. There’s nothing we cannot do if we do it together.”

“I’ll be a president for the whole country,” Biden vowed. “For those who vote for me and those who vote against me. We need to rise to this moment, for the sake of our country we love.”

Trump has already stolen two Supreme Court seats

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Trump has already scored two Supreme Court picks through various levels of foul play. The first was the seat Mitch McConnell used his role as Senate majority leader to hold open for over a year at the end of Barack Obama’s presidency. McConnell created a Supreme Court vacancy longer than any since the Civil War.

Trump’s second nominee came after the president waged a “17-month campaign” to get Chief Justice Kennedy to resign. This included appointing former Kennedy clerks to “plum judicial posts,” like Kennedy protegé Gorsuch’s placement on the Supreme Court. Trump also made sure to be friendly with Justice Kennedy’s son, Justin. Trump already knew Justin Kennedy through his work with the Trump Organization at Deutsche Bank (which is now under investigation for money laundering).

The math

The loss of Ruth Bader Ginsburg moved the Supreme Court to a conservative majority: there are now only three reliably liberal justices. Previously, one of the five conservative justices could swing a decision, but now a single convert to a more liberal argument would only create a tie. A tie upholds a lower court’s decision until a related case might make its way back up to the Supreme Court.

Part of Trump’s tax “cut” was the removal of the ACA related penalty for not buying into a health care plan. In 2012, Chief Justice Roberts voted in the 5-4 majority to uphold the ACA based on the reasoning that the penalty was “a constitutionally appropriate tax.” Without this tax, Roberts’s prior reasoning falls away, and the 5th Circuit used this to uphold a Texas judge’s ruling that the ACA was unconstitutional.

The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) scheduled arguments for November 10 over whether the ACA is constitutional.

Even if Justice Roberts continues to vote in favor of the ACA, with RBG gone from the court, his vote, at best, will create a tie. That would allow a lower court ruling against the ACA to stand; that ruling would be binding only on the 5th circuit, but it would stand as case law for other courts to rely on, until such time as a similar case was brought in front of the Supreme Court.