Democratic state attorneys general and lawyers for the Democratic House of Representatives have asked the Supreme Court to immediately step in to decide the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act.
The House lawyers and state attorneys general stepped into the breach to defend the existing law when Donald Trump's Department of Justice took the extraordinary decision not just to refuse to defend the law, but also to argue it should be struck down, in a ridiculous case brought by Republican states led by Texas. Despite the extremely shaky legal basis for the challenge, a highly partisan judge on the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals struck down the entire law. On appeal, the court tried to split the baby, ruling on the one hand that a key plank of the law is unconstitutional but on the other that that doesn't mean that the whole thing should be thrown out. It sent it back down to the same judge who has already said that the whole law should be thrown out to double check his work.
The Democratic AGs and House lawyers want the Supreme Court to bypass that step. Arguing that the law is a "fixture of the American health-care system," the House's lawyer Donald Verrilli urged the justices to review the "remarkable" lower court decision that "threatens profound destabilization of the health care system." The lawyers for the Democrats write in their filing that this case "represents yet another effort by litigants who disagree with the policy judgments embodied in the ACA to use the courts, rather than the democratic process, to undo the work of the people's elected representatives."
Will the court bite? Who knows. It would take four justices to decide to take the case, and there are probably four on both the liberal and the wing-nut sides who would want to take it on—the liberals to try to salvage the law, making the bet that Chief Justice John Roberts would be with them, and the conservatives making the bet that he'd vote with them to destroy it. But that same uncertain balance could argue the other way, particularly in this election year when they all might just as soon try to stay out of overt politics.