House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy reportedly warned President Trump that his new support for the courts striking down Obamacare in its entirety is a mistake.
The California Republican told Trump in a recent phone call that the administration’s decision Monday night to ask an appeals court to remove all of Obamacare makes no sense, according to sources reported by Axios.
McCarthy said that eliminating the healthcare law would only hurt the GOP, after Democrats successfully ran in 2018 on support for Obamacare’s corrections for people with pre-existing conditions. Other Republican legislators have expressed disapproval of the Trump administration’s intervention in the courts, as the lawsuit would further divide the party over healthcare policy.
[Related: Trump promises healthcare plan ‘far better than Obamacare’]
Republican state attorneys general had sued to invalidate Obamacare on the grounds that, because Congress had eliminated the individual mandate that required people to buy insurance, the rest of the law must fall as well. U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor agreed and deemed the law invalid.
The Department of Justice had previously sided with the Republican attorneys general, but had called only for Obamacare’s protections for people with pre-existing conditions to be struck down, as opposed to the entire law. On Monday night, though, the DOJ announced it would side with Judge O’Connor.
“I think the Justice Department has a duty to defend the duly enacted laws,” Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, told Axios. “If the president disagrees with a law, then he should ask Congress to repeal or change that law. He should not try to get rid of it through the courts.”
If the courts were to wipe out the entire healthcare law, millions would be left without health insurance without a GOP plan to fix it.
The GOP failed to repeal and replace the entire law in 2017, but later managed to abolish the individual mandate, a longstanding Republican goal, through the tax overhaul that Trump signed.
