Have you ever heard the words “tasseography” or “tassology”? In plain English, it’s the practice of reading the patterns of tea leaves, coffee grounds or wine sediments to tell the future. I have concluded that these substances are just as reliable as all the political polls, the talking heads on cable television and the work of Washington investigative reporters in determining what will happen in the 2020 election.
I decided to check out the tea leaves from my favorite brew, and they told me about one factor that could decide who the next president will be. Like it or not, the U.S. Supreme Court has before it three cases that may determine who will be sitting in the White House in January 2021. The pending cases with the biggest political overtones will affect the fate of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, the Affordable Care Act and Roe v. Wade.
The DACA case encompasses as many as 800,000 children who were born in the United States to parents who were not citizens. They are the innocent targets of the Trump administration, which favors deporting them to countries they have never lived in. It is estimated that 85 percent of those who benefit from the program are either gainfully employed or are attending schools in this country. They rarely commit crimes and are considered good and stable people.
Should the court decide that the Obama administration decision to allow them to stay in America was illegal, their immigration status would be immediately threatened. During his campaign in 2016, candidate Donald Trump stated that he was “sympathetic to their cause” and pledged to work with the Congress to resolve their status. Once in office, the president reneged on his promise and launched a challenge that could result in their deportation.
The next court case that will cause enormous political tremors involves the legality of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare. Over 20 million Americans rely on it for their basic health care. For the first two years of the Trump administration, the ACA was under constant attack. It survived a congressional assault thanks to a vote cast in the Senate by the late John McCain. While Congress was fiddling with Obamacare, a group of state attorneys general initiated their own lawsuit to wipe out the protections of the act. In 2018, the Trump administration joined the lawsuit, which is now before the highest court.