Joe Biden misstated Supreme Court nominee Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s position on Obamacare in Tuesday’s presidential debate.
Responding to moderator Chris Wallace’s opening question on each candidate’s position on Judge Barrett, Biden responded, “What she’s written before she went on the bench, which is her right, that she thinks the Affordable Care Act is not constitutional.”
Barrett has not said that the ACA, also known as Obamacare, is unconstitutional. She has written that Obamacare’s individual mandate, the requirement that people have health coverage or pay fine, is not constitutional.
She addressed the issue in a 2017 journal article for Notre Dame Law School. The background for the article is that in the 2012 case NFIB v. Sebelius, Chief Justice Roberts was the swing vote in a 5-4 decision upholding the mandate. Barrett claimed that “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; 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.”
Biden also said that President Trump wants to get rid of Obamacare — on there, he is on much firmer ground. Trump recently tweeted that the Supreme Court terminating Obamacare would “be a big WIN for the USA.”
