Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Supreme Court live updates

Ginsburg’s death has heightened the possibility that Obamacare could be struck down, and Democrats are making that a central message in the battle over whether Trump should fill the court vacancy.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) repeatedly brought up a high-profile lawsuit against the Affordable Care Act — scheduled to be heard by the Supreme Court on Nov. 10 — in an interview on ABC News’s “This Week.”

Trump “doesn’t’ want to crush the virus, he wants to crush the Affordable Care Act,” Pelosi said, stressing the law’s protections for people with preexisting health conditions.

“Those are the people the president wants to crush when he says he wants to replace the justice in this short period of time,” Pelosi said.

The administration has refused to defend the ACA in a challenge brought by GOP-led states, which are arguing the entire law is unconstitutional — despite it being upheld by the Supreme Court in 2012. The ACA has extended health coverage to tens of millions of Americans, and consumer protections to many more, and would have sweeping consequences should the Supreme Court uphold a lower-court ruling striking it down.

Trump has claimed repeatedly that he is protecting people with preexisting conditions, even though that was a central tenet of the ACA, which he opposes.

“There’s many, many people in our country, and millions more now because of coronavirus, who have preexisting medical conditions,” Pelosi said. “The president has not been truthful in what he has said about that. He is in court to crush preexisting conditions as he crushes the Affordable Care Act instead of crushing the virus.”