Is This Court Filing The First Shot In Four Years Of Legal Battles Against Trump?

[DonViejo]

By TIERNEY SNEED Published DECEMBER 22, 2016, 6:00 AM EST


What will the left’s legal resistance to a President Trump’s administration look like? A move Tuesday by two Obamacare enrollees seeking to intervene in an ongoing lawsuit targeting Affordable Care Act offers a preview.

The details of the lawsuit are wonky, but involve payments to insurers that if eliminated could bring immediate chaos to the individual health insurance market. The enrollees' effort to get involved in the case also heralds the beginning of an era when Trump opponents -- largely shut out from controlling other levers of power -- will have to depend on the courts to push back on an agenda that they say is already raising serious legal and Constitutional concerns.

"This is the start of the Democrats' major effort to scale back the Trump administration," said Adam Winkler, a constitutional law professor at UCLA. "The courts are the only possibility for checking Donald Trump. With Republicans in control of Congress, we can't expect to see Congress checking the President."

Progressive legal advocates will be following a template used aggressively by conservatives in the Obama era who were able to block major agenda items with, in some cases, a single district court decision.

“It’s something that is in the Constitution," said Elizabeth Wydra, the president of Constitutional Accountability Center, a public interest law firm, which is not involved in this particular case. "We have a federalist system and while that’s something that has been perhaps more prominently embraced by the right, it’s definitely something that [the Constitutional Accountability Center] has long litigated progressive federalism positions.”

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http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/house-v-burwell-intervention-trump-legal-wars

[riversedge]

1. The reality of repeal is so horrible to me.

......“Recipients of the cost-sharing reductions who purchased health care insurance policies for 2017 will likely face early termination of those policies, because the federal government permits insurers to leave the exchanges in the event cost-sharing reimbursement payments cease,” the filing said.

But beyond the policy implications of eliminating the payments, the motion to intervene is also focused on how Trump and House Republicans go about ending the payments. A footnote explains that the enrollees don’t dispute the ability of Congress and the President to pass a law changing the ACA, or even the Trump administration's ability to change its legal interpretation of the payments (though that might also invite a lawsuit).

“In each of those cases, Congress and the president are making the decision based on their Constitutional power, it will be clear where the responsibility lies and they can be held accountable by people who like or don’t like the decision,” Andrew Pincus, a Washington, D.C., lawyer representing the enrollees, told TPM. “What would be improper to do is the courts to impose the decision on this issue in a case in which both sides agree, because that it will look like the courts are requiring a decision.”

For this and other reasons, the case is being watched by legal advocates outside the health care policy world. The direction that the Department of Justice takes in this case after Trump takes office next month could provide a hint of how his DOJ will operate on various other issues where it will be called upon to defend federal laws -- including laws that Trump and his administration officials disagree with on a policy level....................