The Supreme Court is hearing another historic case aiming to overturn the Affordable Care Act, more familiarly known as Obamacare. Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the court is conducting oral arguments via telephone and allowing them to be broadcast live to the public.
Here’s what to know for Tuesday:
Time: 10 a.m. ET
Arguments are scheduled for 80 minutes.
Significance: The court is once again being asked to invalidate the 2010 Affordable Care Act, the health care law that includes protections for those with pre-existing conditions, as well as allows parents to keep their children on their health insurance plans until the age of 26 and allowed roughly 20 million to gain coverage over the law’s exchanges and the expansion of Medicaid to low-income adults.
Why now? In 2012, Chief Justice John Roberts, joining with the court’s four liberals, famously upheld Obamacare by calling the law’s individual mandate a tax. But in 2017, the GOP-led Congress cut the tax penalty for those who lacked insurance to zero.
Led by Texas, Republican-led states sued, arguing that since the mandate was no longer tied to a specific tax penalty, it had lost its legal underpinning. They also argued that because the individual mandate was intertwined with a multitude of other provisions, the entire law should fall, including protections for people with preexisting conditions. The Trump administration agrees the law should be declared invalid.
California and other Democratic-led states are defending the law, along with the Democratic-led US House of Representatives.
Participants: Michael Mongan, solicitor general of California; Don Verrilli, attorney for the US House of Representatives; Kyle Hawkins, solicitor general of Texas; and Jeffrey Wall, acting US solicitor general.
Where to find it: CNN.com is streaming live.
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