By Sahil Kapur and Heidi Przybyla - NBC News
Faced with the nomination of a new Supreme Court judge who reinforces the conservative majority, the Democrats in the Senate promise to focus the battle on their confirmation in the future of the Affordable Care Act (ACA, in English), before the possibility that millions of citizens could lose their health care if Republicans follow through on the threat to repeal this measure, as announced by several senators.
The initiative is urgent because the Supreme Court resumes its sessions a week after election day and plans to debate the future of ACA, also known as Obamacare, and even more so when the death toll from coronavirus in the country has exceeded 200,000.
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Trump, who supports the Texas-led lawsuit to invalidate Obamacare, has repeatedly indicated that he would nominate judges to rule against him.
"It will be an important focus," California Senator Dianne Feinstein, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said in an interview Thursday, but "there are other" issues also at stake, he added.
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As a candidate, Trump slammed Chief Justice John Roberts for voting in favor of the Affordable Care Act.
"My judicial appointments will do the right thing," he tweeted in February 2016, "Roberts could have killed Obamacare twice, but he didn't!"
Asked about it, the White House spokesman, Judd Deere, limited himself to saying that the "nominee will be someone who believes in the rule of law and our Constitution as it is written."
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With the announcement of Trump's candidate to replace the vacancy left by Liberal Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who died last Friday at age 87, Democrats lack enough votes to stop her in the Senate.
Thus, they are seeking a strategy to maximize their chances of winning the November 3 election with arguments about the negative consequences of a court with a majority of conservative magistrates.
"Republicans have voted 25 times to remove health care, especially the chapter on patients' pre-existing medical conditions. Now they think this is one way they can do it," said Sen. Patrick Leahy, a Democratic Committee member. Judicial.
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The Trump candidate is likely to refuse to answer questions about her position on Obamacare, but her comments from the past may focus the battle on her confirmation.
That program received the green light in the Supreme Court in 2012 by a vote of 5 in favor and 4 against;
one of the majority judges was Ginsburg herself.
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Republican senators in close re-election races are unclear about their plans on the ACA, as their party lacks a replacement plan should their efforts to eliminate the law be successful.
Sen. Ben Sasse, a Nebraska Republican and a member of the Judiciary Committee, was enraged when asked about the Democrats' plans: "They are going to highlight any issue to try to speak the kind of nonsense."
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Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, also a member of the Judiciary Committee and who supported the lawsuit against ACA when he was attorney general of that state, noted that he did not know if another conservative judge would change the ruling on the future of that program.
"I have no prediction of how the court will vote or what it will mean," Hawley said, "the court has surprised me every time it has taken up an ACA case."
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The focus on health care at the center of the battle in the Senate Supreme Court nominee vote is a new argument by Democrats to draw attention to what is at stake in the future discussions of the highest court as what was in the past the issue of abortion.
However, the fate of the ruling in Roe v.
Wade - who legalized abortion in 1973 - could still be a hot topic, and some Republicans are openly calling for the ruling to be reversed so that states can criminalize this women's right.
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Another Senate Democrat who analyzed the strategy to follow on condition of anonymity maintained that the party "would have accepted at any time an offer to focus the election of the nominee on the health care program."
"So let's take it," he said, "it's very simple: it's a very credible and straightforward argument to say that in three consecutive weeks we will have a confirmation, an election, and then a case to revoke the ACA program. It's three consecutive hits."
