Noah Feldman, Columnist

The GOP’s Last Chance to Gut the ACA Just Died

The Trump administration’s far-fetched legal argument against Obamacare didn’t find enough takers at the Supreme Court.

November 10, 2020 at 7:30 PM UTC

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

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The Supreme Court signaled today during oral argument that it won’t be striking down the whole Affordable Care Act as the Trump administration has asked it to do. The swing justices did seem especially eager to make their views clear — and to dispel any public fear that the court’s ever-deepening conservative majority would do now what it failed to do back in 2012 and undo “Obamacare” altogether.

That’s probably good news for Republicans, given that the 10-year old ACA is politically popular. And it’s especially good news for Republicans facing runoff elections in Georgia, which will determine control over the U.S. Senate. It will now be much harder for Democrats to argue that Georgians should give both seats to the Democrats to protect or, if necessary, reenact the ACA.