Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett said Tuesday in a recent academic exercise she found the requirement for an individual to purchase insurance under the Affordable Care Act – or Obamacare – was unconstitutional but did not invalidate the entire law.
The statement came during Barrett's second day of questioning by the Senate Judiciary Committee as Democrats essentially accused her of being hostile to the legislation, of which the latest challenge to is scheduled to come before the Supreme Court on Nov. 10.
"The vote was, in the panel, the majority said that the mandate was now a penalty and was unconstitutional but severable," Barrett said regarding a mock court exercise she participated in at William & Mary Law School on Sept. 11. "I voted to say that it was unconstitutional but severable."
The case argued and decided during the exercise was California v. Texas, which has at issue whether the Affordable Care Act can stand now that Congress has eliminated what the Supreme Court in 2012 called a tax imposed by the law.
Critics of the law said that without the tax provision, the act is unconstitutional.
Regardless, Barrett said the conference was merely an academic training drill and not necessarily reflective of the way she would view the case if it came before her on the Supreme Court.
"So to the extent that people think I might have been signaling to the president or anyone else what my views on the Affordable Care Act are, they couldn't have taken any signal from that," she said. "But I wasn't trying to signal anything, because it was a mock exercise."
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