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In the late fall and early winter of 2016, before Donald Trump’s inauguration, the country was a fugue state. Those closest to Trump were in shock that he’d won. Trump himself, ranting that he’d been cheated out of the popular vote, seemed disoriented. The majority of Americans were at a loss: How could this floridly corrupt racist have won at all? Especially considering his campaign platform. In the U.K., if a politician mentions tinkering with the National Health Service, which provides free healthcare to everyone, there’s public outcry across the political spectrum. And yet Trump was hot to crush Obamacare, the closest the U.S. had come to squaring the circle of its healthcare conundrum. Modify it or reform it, maybe. But crush it? (Virginia Heffernan, 10/16)

You may be shocked, shocked, to learn that both parties have been playing politics in the context of the Supreme Court confirmation hearings for Amy Coney Barrett. The Republicans have tried to offer feeble rationales for why their rushing the confirmation through can be squared with hanging Merrick Garland out to dry in 2016 for some 400 days. It can’t — the move is unprincipled, bare-knuckled politics. The Democrats have opted for a political strategy of connecting Barrett’s ascent with the court’s opportunity to invalidate Obamacare when it hears a case called Texas vs. California on Nov. 10, a week after the election. The questioning from Democrats has continually leaned on that message, with the help of a series of dramatic stories of citizens whose lives will be devastated if the Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, is struck down. (Harry Litman, 10/15)

Exactly one week after Election Day, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in the case that could overturn the Affordable Care Act. And if Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell gets his way, Judge Amy Coney Barrett will get one of the deciding votes. Republicans in Congress have been trying for years to repeal the health care law – and they’ve failed over and over again. So now President Trump has turned that job over to the courts – and he's made clear that he expects the high court – including his latest appointment to “terminate” the health care law. He wouldn’t have chosen her if he didn’t trust that she would. (Debbie Stabenow, 10/15)

Protections for people with pre-existing conditions would have continued while the judicial process played out. Instead, congressional Democrats and their allies in state governments sought immediate Supreme Court review, perhaps anticipating review while Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg was still on the court. If there is a coming health-insurance crisis, as Democrats claim, it is one of their own invention. (Joel M. Zinberg, 10/14)

Alongside growing controversy over judicial nominations, court reform and Covid-19 policies, American law is in the midst of a little-noticed paradigm shift in courts’ treatment of public health measures. The Republican Party’s campaign to take over the federal and state courts is quietly upending a long and deeply embedded tradition of upholding vital public health regulations. The result has been a radically novel and potentially catastrophic sequence of decisions blocking state responses to the coronavirus pandemic. (John Fabian Witt, 10/15)