In a new op-ed in the Iowa Cedar Rapids Gazette, PFAW senior fellow Elliot Mincberg and Progress Iowa Executive Director Matt Sinovic demonstrate Senator Joni Ernst’s complicity in endangering Iowans’ health and safety through the votes she has taken on Trump judges, who, as nominees had records of hostility to the Affordable Care Act and those who as judges have issued decisions that undermine access to health care.
Ernst has voted to confirm virtually all of Trump’s judicial nominees to the bench–including at least 19 who already had anti-ACA records. Mincberg and Sinovic urge Iowa voters to remember Ernst’s hyper-partisan judicial voting record and the damage to Iowans’ health that she has knowingly caused. Trump judges supported by Ernst have ruled against health and safety regulations affecting consumers and workers, with troubling implications for access to a whole range of benefits and protections.
“Judges have shown their deep hostility to the entire social safety net. Taken to its logical extreme, this is a way of thinking that includes eliminating not just the ACA and lifeline programs like Security and Medicare. It means scrapping federal and state laws and agencies that are designed to ensure that only safe and effective drugs are put on the market…that factories do not dangerously pollute the air we breathe and the water we drink; that discrimination based on race, gender, and other characteristics does not cut off people’s life opportunities; that health and safety on the job is protected; and much more.”
Ernst’s votes to confirm Trump judges who embrace this outlook make her wholly complicit in the harm they cause.