Tuesday, during an appearance on Fox News Channel’s “Fox & Friends,” Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) criticized the tack taken by Senate Democrats during the opening portion of Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation hearing.
Cotton said that given the focus on the Affordable Care Act by Democrats, one might mistake it for a Senate Health Committee hearing.
“You know, as I saw in the hearings yesterday, though, I’ve got to say, Ainsley, I thought I’d stumbled into a hearing of the Senate Health Committee, not the Senate Judiciary Committee,” he said. “The Democrats kept talking about Obamacare and pre-existing conditions as if the Supreme Court’s job is to make health care policy. It’s not their job. It’s the job of Congress and the president. One reason that they’re focusing on that is they want to cover up the continued failures of Obamacare and higher premiums or what the individual mandate did to tax families who couldn’t afford Obamacare. That’s why I worked to have it repealed.”
“And, of course, when you hear them talk about pre-existing conditions, one thing that they try to gloss over is the fact that we also have a plan to cover pre-existing conditions,” Cotton added. “I mean, I think about the teacher I met in Arkansas this year who’d been teaching school and had a pre-existing condition herself, and now she’s going to be teaching the virtual class in that school. And even her little girls decided to stay home as well to help protect their mother. Of course, we want to provide coverage for her and for every Arkansan. What we don’t want to do is have Obamacare continue to drive up rates for every other Arkansan. But those are questions for us in the Congress and the president. That’s not what the health — that’s not what the Supreme Court does. And I — I would suggest that Judge Barrett simply tell those senators today that you’re responsible for health care policy, not the Supreme Court.”
Follow Jeff Poor on Twitter @jeff_poor