Inside the Trump administration's assault on protections for people with preexisting medical conditions
Legal eagles who pay attention to the courthouse fortunes of the Affordable Care Act could tell something weird and bad was in the wind last Thursday, when three career attorneys at the Department of Justice abruptly withdrew from the team defending the law against a right-wing attack by Texas and 19 other red states.
"Forget the canary - this is more like the shrieking hyena in the coal mine," Georgetown University law professor Marty Lederman tweeted that afternoon. His guess was that the "Trump DOJ" was "perhaps about to argue that ACA is 100 percent invalid."
He was close. Only a couple of hours later, the Justice Department filed a brief ending its defense of the law against the Texas case. The department didn't argue that the law was 100 percent invalid, which is the Texas position. But it asserted that two key provisions of the law, which protect Americans with preexisting conditions from
