Lindsey Graham kicked off today’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing by making it abundantly clear what’s at sake: Trump and Republicans want to repeal the ACA, which would take health care away from 20 million Americans and end protections for as many as 133 million Americans with preexisting conditions. 

WATCH HERE:

Republicans made striking down the ACA a central part of their 2016 platform.

Republican Platform: According to the platform, “[o]nly a Republican president will appoint judges who respect the rule of law expressed within the Constitution and Declaration of Independence, including the inalienable right to life and the laws of nature and nature’s God, as did the late Justice Antonin Scalia. … Only such appointments will enable courts to begin to reverse the long line of activist decisions — including Roe, Obergefell, and the Obamacare cases.”

Trump campaigned on appointing judges who would strike down the ACA.

2015 — TRUMP: “If I win the presidency, my judicial appointments will do the right thing unlike Bush’s appointee John Roberts on Obamacare.”

2016 — TRUMP: “Remember, Cruz and Bush gave us Roberts who upheld #Obamacare twice! I am the only one who will #MAKEAMERICAGREATAGAIN!”

2016 — TRUMP: “Justice Roberts, everybody liked Justice Roberts, turned out to be a disaster because of Obamacare. he could have killed it twice, and he turned out to be a total disaster, so.”

2016 — TRUMP: “I’m disappointed in [Chief Justice] Roberts because he gave us Obamacare, he had two chances to end Obamacare, he should have ended it by every single measurement and he didn’t do it, so that was a disappointing one. Everybody thought he was good, he was a Bush appointee, he was somebody that should have, frankly, ended Obamacare, and he didn’t. You never know what’s going to happen. That’s one of the truly very important positions of a president, and I think you’ll be very happy with the people we put in.”

Trump remains committed to using the courts to dismantle the ACA.

May 2020 — TRUMP: “We want to terminate health care under Obamacare.”

September 2020 — TRUMP: “Obamacare will be replaced with a MUCH better, and FAR cheaper, alternative if it is terminated in the Supreme Court. Would be a big WIN for the USA!”

October 2020 — TRUMP: “Obamacare is a disaster.”

Amy Coney Barrett has strongly suggested that she would strike down the ACA.

Washington Post:  “Judge Barrett’s Writing Criticizes The Supreme Court Decision Upholding Obama-Era Health Law”

Washington Post: “Among the most revealing was an essay she wrote at the start of 2017, four months before Trump nominated her to the circuit bench. In the essay published by a journal of Notre Dame Law School, where she was a professor, Barrett argues that judges should respect the text of laws and contends that Chief ustice John G. Roberts Jr., who wrote the majority opinion the first time the Supreme Court upheld the health-care law, ‘pushed the Affordable Care Act beyond its plausible meaning to save the statute.’”

NPR’s TOM ASHBROOK: “If the Court had taken this phrase, which clearly did not align with the intent of the law, and overturned in effect the whole law on that basis, would that have made it an activist Court, not in line with conservative legal principles?” BARRETT: “Well, let’s see. I think that the phrase ‘activist court’ is sometimes used to describe a court that is willing to overturn statutes passed by Congress. Or state legislatures, for that matter. But I would say that actually, I don’t think of the term ‘activist’ in that way, because you might say that to uphold the Constitution as against legislation is exactly what a Court ought to be doing.”