LA Times Article Looks At Republican Candidates Reversing Their Anti-ACA Stances - Including Dan Sullivan

Alaskans have all recently watched as Senator Dan Sullivan was forced by a leaked video to take a strong Twitter stand against Pebble Mine.  In the video, Pebble executives say that Sullivan is in their corner, but keeping quiet before the election. 

An LA Times article today says Sullivan, along with other Republicans like Iowa's Joni Ernst, are backing off their earlier anti-ACA stands.  

"WASHINGTON — Contempt for the Affordable Care Act — Obamacare — was so central to Sen. Joni Ernst’s 2014 election campaign that the Iowa Republican, in a TV ad promising she’d “unload” on the law, pulled out a handgun and fired repeatedly. “Give me a shot,” she asked voters.

Six years later, the first-term senator is battling for reelection, and she’s holstered her gun.

Ernst is not alone. Earlier this month, she joined fellow Republican Sens. Cory Gardner of Colorado and Dan Sullivan of Alaska — two other would-be assassins of the 10-year-old healthcare law who are now fighting for their political survival — in breaking with their party to support Obamacare on the Senate floor. They voted with Democrats on a measure opposing a Republican-backed case against the law that’s now before the Supreme Court.

As that vote showed, endangered Republicans are frantically trying to pivot away from the “repeal Obamacare” slogans that served them well for much of the last decade. Those are now a liability amid a jump in public support for the healthcare law.

Candidates also are playing down the long-standing legal challenge initiated by a coalition of Republican-led states that’s reached the Supreme Court. And from President Trump on down, they claim to be guardians of Obamacare’s most popular provision — a guarantee of insurance coverage for people with preexisting conditions — though that mandate would fall with the rest of the law if the court’s conservative majority sides with Republicans."

As you can see from the chart below, Alaska is one of only four states not involved in the case, either for or against the ACA.  

The chart comes from a Kaiser Family Foundation webpage that explains the court case and who all is involved.  Click on the chart to enlarge and focus it.

But I'm more troubled by unflagging loyalty to Trump as one of the bots on the Republican side of the US Senate.  He acts like a kid who doesn't want the teacher to call on him.  Sort of like the Pebble guy who said he's trying to lie low until the election is over.  And while he said he didn't vote for Trump in 2016, he now says he will.  

One has to wonder who is holding all those Republican Senators in line and voting to confirm Amy Barrett's appointment to the Supreme Court.  Senator Whitehouse gave the most insightful presentation on that in the Hearings and I'm hoping to get up a post about that soon.  I'll link to it here when I do.  

[UPDATE October 17, 2020:  Here's another article from Salon:  Alaska GOP senator routinely voted for policies that benefited family's chemical company]