Biden falsely claims Amy Coney Barrett ‘said she wants to get rid of the Affordable Care Act’

Supreme Court arguments in a case challenging Obamacare are set to begin on Nov. 10, and Democrats assume that Barrett will vote to strike down the law, forming the core of Democratic opposition to her nomination.

Biden, a former chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee who is familiar with Supreme Court confirmation battles, misrepresented Barrett’s previous statements on the matter.

“This nominee has said she wants to get rid of the Affordable Care Act — this president wants to get rid of the Affordable Care Act. Let’s keep our eye on the ball. This is about less than one month [in which] Americans are going to lose their health insurance,” Biden told reporters before flying to Ohio on Monday.

Barrett, formerly a law professor at the University of Notre Dame who was a law clerk for the late Justice Antonin Scalia, has criticized Supreme Court decisions that upheld the healthcare law, but she has not said that she wants to eliminate it.

In a 2017 law review essay, Barrett critiqued Chief Justice John Roberts’s opinion that upheld the Affordable Care Act on the basis of treating the penalty for not complying with the individual mandate as a tax.

“Chief Justice Roberts pushed the Affordable Care Act beyond its plausible meaning to save the statute. He construed the penalty imposed on those without health insurance as a tax, which permitted him to sustain the statute as a valid exercise of the taxing power,” Barrett wrote. “Had he treated the payment as the statute did — as a penalty — he would have had to invalidate the statute as lying beyond Congress’s commerce power.”

The individual mandate penalty for those who do not buy health insurance was eliminated as part of the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act.

In 2015, Barrett also criticized the decision in another challenge to Obamacare, King v. Burwell, in which the court upheld the legality of the program’s tax subsidies.

Barrett told NPR that while “it’s clearly a good result that these millions of Americans won’t lose their tax subsidies,” she asserted, “The dissent has the better of the legal argument.”

Barrett is known for her originalist view of the law.

“It was the content of Justice Scalia’s reasoning that shaped me. His judicial philosophy was straightforward: A judge must apply the law as written, not as the judge wishes it were. Sometimes, that approach meant reaching results that he did not like. But as he put it in one of his best-known opinions, that is what it means to say we have a government of laws, not of men,” Barrett is expected to say in her opening statement.

Contrary to Biden’s assertion, Barrett has said that she does not go into legal decisions with the intent of making policy.

“The policy decisions and value judgments of government must be made by the political branches elected by and accountable to the people. The public should not expect courts to do so, and courts should not try,” her opening remarks say.