A 20-State Challenge May Take Down ObamaCare

One former attorney general is confident that a new lawsuit against Obamacare has a good chance at coming out victorious.

By Chris Woodward, OneNewsNow, March 1, 2018

Attorney General Ken Paxton (R-Texas) is co-leader of an effort with 17 other attorneys general and two governors in suing to have the Affordable Care Act (ACA) declared unconstitutional.

Former Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli maintains that legal precedent established over five years ago makes for the perfect groundwork for the demise of Obamacare in the newly waged lawsuit.

“Based on the 2012 case, they should win,” Cuccinelli shared Wednesday on American Family Radio (AFR) Talk’s Sandy Rios In the Morning.

The underlying argument involves the individual mandate penalty – or tax – that the United States Supreme Court under the Obama administration upheld in the first case against the ACA, which was held back in 2012.

“The tax reform bill that just went through eliminated that tax penalty – as of January 1, 2019,” Cuccinelli explained. “What Congress has done and the president has signed eliminates the one hook the Supreme Court relied upon to hold Obamacare constitutional.”

The case was filed Monday in federal court in Fort Worth, Texas, and has the support of Senate Conservatives.

Paul Larkin, senior legal research fellow at The Heritage Foundation, tells OneNewsNow he has observed that proposing to eliminate the tax on constitutional grounds would endanger the future of ObamaCare.

“The only surprise I had,” he says, “was that it took so long for someone to bring a lawsuit.”

“The government has to respond to the complaint, and that’s really interesting,” Cuccinelli pointed out. “So, now Donald Trump and his administration are being sued over Obamacare because they’re in office, and my own view is they ought to simply acknowledge that it’s unconstitutional – and that it ends on December 31, 2018. They ought to just settle the case.”

Texas and Wisconsin are joined in the lawsuit against Obamacare by Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine (Gov. Paul LePage (R-Maine), Mississippi (Gov. Phi Bryant (R-Miss), Missouri, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Utah and West Virginia.