Devlin Barrett & Matt Zapotosky report for the Washington Post:
A senior career Justice Department official has resigned in the wake of the Trump administration’s move to stop defending a key provision of the Affordable Care Act, a departure that highlights internal frustration generated by the decision, according to people familiar with the matter.
Joel McElvain, who has worked at the Justice Department for more than 20 years, submitted his resignation letter Friday, the morning after Attorney General Jeff Sessions notified Congress that the agency will not defend the ACA — the 2010 law known as Obamacare — against lawsuits brought by Republican-led states challenging its requirement that most Americans carry health insurance.
As a presidential candidate, Donald Trump campaigned on the promise of repealing Obamacare, but that effort faltered in Congress. Last year, lawmakers amended the law, nullifying the provision requiring people to carry insurance. That takes effect in 2019.
[Trump administration won’t defend ACA against suit from GOP states]
The Justice Department’s decision last week reversed years of legal work McElvain and the Justice Department had performed on the issue.
McElvain and his team were honored in 2013 with the Attorney General’s Award for exceptional service defending the legislation in court. A Justice Department spokeswoman confirmed his resignation takes effect in early July. McElvain declined to comment.
Those who know McElvain described him as an expert lawyer and a well-liked boss.
“This is the first I’m hearing it, and it’s a gut punch,” said one person who worked with McElvain for years and spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive personnel issue. “That will be a very big blow to the morale of the [agency’s] civil division, a really sad day for the Department of Justice and a loss for the country.”
Several colleagues said McElvain was in line to become director of the Justice Department’s federal programs branch, which handles complex government policy questions pending before the courts. It is not known for its politics but for the tenacity with which its lawyers defend the law — any law — passed by Congress.
“Joel is just phenomenal. He’s just such a terrific lawyer and a great person,” said a former Justice Department official who knows McElvain. “ . . . It’s a lot of institutional knowledge and a great deal of experience walking out the door.”
It was previously reported that shortly after the Justice Department reversed itself, McElvain and two other Justice Department lawyers who had been defending the ACA withdrew from a case pending in a Texas court.
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Read the rest of the article at the link.
I suspect that some stressed out U.S. Immigration Judges left this week’s so-called “training” conference (more like a “brainwashing session”) thinking about whether this also would be their future.
Sessions delivered a shockingly lawless and xenophobic lecture in which he abandoned the Due Process role of the Immigration Courts, trashed judicial independence, treated them like junior immigration enforcement officers, encouraged “worst judicial practices,” told them it’s “all about the numbers,” minimized the compelling human plight of asylum seekers, lied about EOIR statistics, and ordered them to follow his rewrite of established asylum law that essentially could make U.S. Immigration Judges members of a “shooting squad” sent out to execute women and children refugees from the Northern Triangle without Due Process.
Some must have also found being a “delegee” of the “Chief Official Child Abuser of the U.S.” at least somewhat troubling. Not a great way to round out a career with the pathetic remains of the once-proud DOJ (now widely regarded as a bastion of White Nationalism, legal incompetence, and overt political bias).
PWS
06-13-18