Pelosi: Trump hurrying to fill SCOTUS seat so he can repeal ObamaCare

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said Tuesday that President Trump is rushing to fill the Supreme Court vacancy left by late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg so he can repeal ObamaCare, formally known as the Affordable Care Act. 

“Why the president is in such a rush is because he’s in a hurry to overturn the Affordable Care Act. And he wants to do that,” Pelosi said at The Atlantic Festival on Tuesday night. “The oral arguments start Nov. 10, a week after the election, and he wants to get a justice in there in time for that so they can hear the arguments and vote on it.”

Trump and Senate GOP leaders signaled shortly after Ginsburg’s death on Friday that they would move on appointing a new judge on the conservative-majority court. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) appears to have locked down enough votes to approve a nominee, whom Trump said will be announced on Saturday. 

Pelosi echoed other House Democrats, who said Tuesday that Republicans are rushing to fill the vacancy so another conservative justice can join the court and weigh in on a lawsuit challenging the Obama-era healthcare expansion. 

“People have to know what this means to them,” Pelosi said. “Yeah, they know that the Republicans are hypocritical; they said one thing and another—who cares. What they care about is what it means to them. And what it means to 150 million families in America is that no longer will they have the protection of the Affordable Care Act when it comes to a pre-existing medical condition.”

Their move to consider a nominee less than two months before an election is a reversal from the GOP’s stance in 2016, when they refused to move then-President Obama’s final Supreme Court nominee, Merrick Garland.