Barrett won't say if Medicare is constitutional
Democrats are fearmongering.
It's rather pathetic to see.
I saw a whole lot of politicking on both sides, and few if any serious questions to the nominee. The vast majority of the time was spent campaigning.
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Barrett won't say if Medicare is constitutional
WASHINGTON — In the third day of Senate hearings, Democrats continued to press their case that Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett is hostile to the Affordable Care Act, a central element of their long-shot effort to derail her nomination.
That argument was helped along on Wednesday by an exchange between Barrett and Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, during which the nominee refused to say if the law creating Medicare is constitutional.
While that may not keep Barrett from joining the Supreme Court, it could hurt the prospects of both President Trump and Senate Republicans. Democrats have relentlessly depicted them as wanting to take away Americans' health care, an argument helped along by the GOP's efforts to repeal the Affordable Care Act.
Barrett seemed to unwittingly play into that narrative in her exchange with Feinstein.
"Some have argued that the Medicare program is unconstitutional," Feinstein said, describing the federal benefit as, in those critics' view, "an unconstitutional exercise in congressional spending power."
Medicare, which was created in 1965, pays for hospitalization and medical bills for Americans older than 65. Although many Americans worry about whether the federal government will adequately fund Medicare in the future, it is broadly popular among senior citizens.
© Provided by Yahoo! News Sen. Dianne Feinstein questions Amy Coney Barrett during her confirmation hearing on Wednesday. (Bonnie Cash/Pool/Reuters)
Access to the companion program, Medicaid, which covers low-income Americans, was expanded under the Affordable Care Act, a move that has become more popular since the start of the coronavirus pandemic.
Feinstein then proceeded to read from a brief 2015 essay by Michael Rappaport, a conservative legal scholar at the University of San Diego. Titled "The Unconstitutionality of Social Security and Medicare," the paper argues that "these programs would have never taken their pernicious form if the Constitution's original meaning had been followed in the first place."
Barrett is, like Rappaport, a constitutional originalist. An originalist philosophy would be consistent with Rappaport's conclusion that popular though they may be, New Deal and Great Society social programs — often called "entitlements" because qualified recipients are "entitled" to them by law — represent an illegitimate expansion of the administrative state.
Conservative icon Ronald Reagan got his start in politics by recording a now famous speech against Medicare when Democrats proposed it in 1961. He called it "socialized medicine," the same phrase Republicans would use to attack the Affordable Care Act 50 years later.
Shrinking the "welfare state" has been the project of many Republicans in Congress, who almost uniformly support Barrett's nomination to the high court. In 2017, Barrett criticized Chief Justice John Roberts — himself a judicial conservative appointed by a Republican president — because, she wrote, he "pushed the Affordable Care Act beyond its plausible meaning to save the statute."
© Provided by Yahoo! News Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday. (Greg Nash/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)
With that view plainly in mind, Feinstein asked Barrett if she agreed with "originalists who say that the Medicare program is unconstitutional."
Barrett said she was "not familiar" with Rappaport's article. Pressed by Feinstein for an opinion on the broader point about Medicare's legitimacy, Barrett said she could not "answer that question in the abstract," citing the so-called Ginsburg rule, an excuse frequently used by Republican-nominated judges to avoid revealing how they might rule.
"I also don't know what the arguments would be," she added, referring, presumably, to a case that sought to challenge Medicare's validity. A seemingly incredulous Feinstein described Medicare as "really sacrosanct in this country."
Democrats outside the hearing room quickly seized on what they saw as a devastating admission by the nominee. "Every senior in America and everyone on Medicare needs to know this," tweeted Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. "We already knew Judge Barrett is ready to end the ACA and rip health care from millions. Now she's refusing to even say that Medicare is constitutional!"
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I am glad that Lindsay Graham gave the Democrats plenty of air time to make themselves look foolish.
Kudos to Barrett for her demeanor and composure.
Yeah, maga Kudos. I especially admired her stance--or non stance--on contraception. That was interesting.
Don't you wish the gop would be honest and just admit that they want to eliminate Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid? That they will make it legal again to discriminate based on race and sex and to not cover preexisting conditions? That they would end marriage equality? That they want to put women and doctors into prison for exercising reproductive choices they do not like? Why don't they just admit it?
Because it is all Voting Box Poison!
No, but I do wish fervently that Democrats would stop lying about Republicans. And proving Reagan right so damn often.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/CGViwu6pBDK/?igshid=1nunk6ha005ba
Could it be that nothing in 'conservative world' is constitutional with the exception of wealth and power transfer into the control of the upper economic tiers?
Feinstein asked Barrett if she agreed with "originalists who say that the Medicare program is unconstitutional."
Barrett said she was "not familiar" with Rappaport's article. Pressed by Feinstein for an opinion on the broader point about Medicare's legitimacy, Barrett said she could not "answer that question in the abstract," citing the so-called Ginsburg rule,
https://thenewstalkers.com/community/discussion/52244/barrett-wont-say-if-medicare-is-constitutional
"abstract." Of course.
No.
She also didn't say it was unconstitutional.
This is the whole thing. Make your argument. She has said previously that she want to see evidence and hear arguments. It is not her mission to set about confirming or overturning all previous SCOTUS rulings.
The SCOTUS has produced rulings that keep Social Security (and lots of other things) going, and those rulings are current law. But that doesn't mean there isn't an untried argument out there somewhere that could prompt the Court to find the program unconstitutional.
What these Senators want Barrett to do is to make some kind of holy pronouncement that Social Security is immune to challenge now and for all time. That's just not going to happen.