Trump Admin Ends Up In Odd Position Of Defending ACA Against Attempt To Slash Free Services

In a surreal pairing to anyone who’s been politically cognizant for the past decade, the Trump administration defended the Affordable Care Act at the Supreme Court Monday against a Christian-owned company seeking to end its free preventative care requirements. 

It was an odd bedfellows pairing, given that President Trump has long despised former President Obama’s signature legislative achievement, and tried to overturn it for months in 2017 before failing, despite having a Republican trifecta. 

Still, the Trump administration’s motivation for supporting the law aligns with its greater mission of crafting a muscular presidency with virtually no constraints on its power. It sees the secretary of health and human services’ ability to appoint task force members as an explicit outgrowth of that presidential power it seeks to protect. 

“All officers who wield executive power on the President’s behalf must operate within ‘a clear and effective chain of command’ leading up to the President,” the administration wrote in a brief. “The President must be able to hold all his subordinates fully accountable, and the President, in turn, is fully accountable to the People.”

Braidwood Management, represented by former Texas Solicitor General Jonathan Mitchell (author of the infamous bounty hunter-style abortion ban), is targeting the structure of the task force that makes the recommendations of services insurers must offer for free.   

“One thing we all agree on is that the task force was unconstitutionally appointed for the 13-year period that began in March of 2010, when the Affordable Care Act was first enacted into law, through June of 2023 when Secretary Becerra reappointed the task force,” Mitchell said Monday. “And everyone agrees, I would think, that recommendations they issued during that 13-year period cannot be enforced until the task force reissued those recommendations after receiving a constitutional appointment.”

That would leave a lapse of uncertain duration for the free health care services, including cancer and diabetes screenings, statin medications, physical therapy for older adults and blindness prevention in newborns, per the administration’s brief.

The justices battled over the status of the members of the task force, debating the extent of their independence. Exchanges got testy at points, with Justice Samuel Alito remarking after Justice Sonia Sotomayor tried to define the independence of the task force members: “That’s an incredibly strained interpretation of the term ‘independent.’”

Monday’s case bubbled up to the Court while other cases more squarely addressing independent agencies wing that way as well. One, stemming from the unlawful firings of members of the National Labor Relations Board and Merit Systems Protection Board, may end with the Supreme Court knocking down one of the last means of protecting agency members from political retribution. 

Justice Elena Kagan seemed to gesture to that landscape Monday, as well as the more localized one of the Roberts Court’s consistent hostility to and chipping away at independent executive branch agencies. 

“We don’t go around just creating independent agencies — more often, we destroy independent agencies,” she quipped, prompting laughter in the courtroom.