Dive Brief:
- The White House is highlighting President Barack Obama's nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, Merrick Garland, has "more federal judicial experience than any Supreme Court nominee in history."
- Garland, who currently serves as chief justice of the U.S. Court of Appeals in D.C., is considered a moderate and was confirmed to his current role with the bipartisan support of the U.S. Senate in 1997. The White House announcement includes a section on "The Senate's Constitutional Responsibility to Act."
- On Wednesday, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell stated, "It's the president's constitutional right to nominate a Supreme Court justice, and it is the Senate's constitutional right to act as a check on a president and withhold its consent."
Dive Insight:
If Garland joins the highest court, he will bring with him experience from several high profile healthcare related cases, notes Modern Healthcare, though the White House announcement highlights his experience in anti-terrorism cases.
Among his past cases were one in which Garland was a member of a three-judge panel that heard arguments from hospitals regarding Medicare underpaying for outlier payments. The panel ruled HHS needed to be more tranparent about how payment amounts were determined, but disagreed the calculations resulted in underpayments in 2005 and 2006.
Garland also served as head of the court when it planned to re-hear Halbig v. Burwell, an argument over whether ACA insurance premium subsidies should be provided to enrollees reliant on the federal rather than state health exchanges. Instead, however, the court deferred to the Supreme Court's decision in King v. Burwell which upheld the subsidies for all states--unlike the D.C. appeals court's initial ruling.
"It seems clear President Obama made this nomination not, not with the intent of seeing the nominee confirmed, but in order to politicize it for purposes of the election," McConnell said. So it doesn't look like that nomination will go very far.