Wood Chipper Averted (Presumably Deliberately)

Look, I know I am late to the game, but the political motive in the latest Obamacare lawsuit is obvious.

Put briefly, Congress repealed all penalty for not having health insurance.  A number of Republicans then sued to have the the individual mandate declared unconstitutional because it was no longer a tax, but an intolerable intrusion.  And, since it had been previously argued that the entire law stood or fell on the individual mandate, they called for the entire law to be struck down.

This legal argument was taken seriously by basically no one.

And so, most alarmingly, the district judge accepted it and struck down the entire law.  The effect would have been to shut down the exchanges where some ten million people buy health insurance, roll back a Medicaid expansion covering some 10 million people, and remove protections for people with pre-existing conditions.  In other words, as one Republican consultant put it, it made as much sense politically as diving head-first into a wood chipper.

Nonetheless, Donald Trump is determined to erase the Obama legacy, and if Obama was against diving headfirst into wood chippers, then Trump as to be for it.  Of course, the losing side appealed, and, in the face of all common sense, Donald Trump insisted that his Justice Department argue in favor of the decision. 

The assumption was that the Court of Appeals (Fifth Circuit) would either uphold or strike down the decision.  The loser would then appeal to the Supreme Court, which would hear the case in the summer of 2020.

In other words, the summer before the election, the American people would witness the Trump Administration argue in favor of stripping 20 million people of their health insurance and remove protections for pre-existing conditions.  Short of something disastrous actually happening, this is one of the most effective ways to commit electoral suicide.  The question would not be whether the wood chipper would get Donald Trump, but how much of the Republican Party he would drag along with him.

And so the three-judge panel in the Fifth Circuit stepped in to save Donald Trump from himself.  By a 2-1 vote, they declared the individual mandate unconstitutional and kicked the case back to the district judge to reconsider his ruling and determine, in detail, what must stand and what must fall. 

The obvious goal here is to postpone argument in front of the Supreme Court until after the 2020 election and thereby keep Donald Trump from diving headfirst into a wood chipper.