If a lawsuit from 20 states succeeds in eliminating Obamacare it would be a “pretty big middle finger to the legislative branch,” Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., said Wednesday.
Murphy spoke during a press conference on the lawsuit that was the subject of a preliminary hearing Wednesday in Fort Worth, Texas. The lawsuit argues that since the tax law zeros out the individual mandate’s financial penalty in 2019 then the rest of the law should go too.
Murphy took umbrage with the legal line of thinking, noting that Congress did not intend to get rid of the entire law in tax reform. If it wanted to get rid of the law then Congress would have done so, he argued.
“I have deep disagreements on what they did,” Murphy said of the tax bill. “It would be a stunning act of legislating from the bench if this judge overrode the decision that Republicans made in the tax bill to keep the rest of the [Affordable Care Act] while removing the individual mandate.”
Federal Judge Reed O’Connor, an appointee of former President George W. Bush, was sympathetic to Texas’s argument during the hearing on a preliminary injunction. The injunction would halt federal enforcement of Obamacare while the lawsuit goes through the courts, which would include halting enforcement of an Obamacare requirement for insurance plans to cover pre-existing conditions.
Murphy said that if the judge ruled in favor of the lawsuit then it would be “the most stunning act of judicial activism in Congress.”
Murphy and other Senate Democrats also criticized the Justice Department for asking the judge to not rule on the injunction until after open enrollment starts this November for 2019 plans.
The Justice Department declined to defend Obamacare and supports the Texas lawsuit. However, the Justice Department only believes Obamacare’s pre-existing conditions provisions should be eliminated, not the entire law as the lawsuit wants.
“The fact is today that Trump’s own Department of Justice echoed what we are talking about,” said Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore. “What we have said from the very beginning is there is going to be bedlam in the private insurance marketplace.”
