Politico is reporting today, correctly, that window is closing for those who want to bulldoze the Obama health law in court. It is going to become increasingly difficult because courts are much less willing to overturn something that is already entrenched said Randy Barnett, the Georgetown University law professor who helped construct the Supreme Court argument against the law earlier this year.
Critics are still fighting the law in court on several fronts, and Barnett hasn’t given up hope that one of those challenges could succeed. But the more Obamacare benefits become available to people, the harder it is to undo.
There’s no question that one of the reasons why we had as much room to run as we did is we had a two-year delay in implementing most of the law, he said, referring to the multi-state lawsuit he helped fight. Had more of the health law been up and running, it would’ve been much more difficult for us to even make the challenge. That opening is closing.
Some of Barnett’s allies in the Supreme Court case seemed to indicate as much with their silence. Michael Carvin and Paul Clement, two of the other lead attorneys, said they were not tracking other anti-Obamacare litigation and declined to comment to Politico. That’s good news for the law’s backers.
Randy Barnett is right. He’s a legal scholar with a relationship to reality, said Ethan Rome, executive director of Health Care for American Now. I think that courts don’t like to undo programs that are already being implemented that are impacting millions of people, especially when the highest court in the land found the law to be constitutional. Revisiting parts of it is obviously political and ideological.