Tucker Carlson Makes Bogus Claim There Are No Pending Obamacare Court Cases (Video)

The Supreme Court is literally scheduled to hear a case on the constitutionality of Obamacare next month

The Trump administration is currently suing to have the Supreme Court invalidate all of the Affordable Care Act, and the Supreme Court will hear that case beginning on November 10. But that didn’t stop Tucker Carlson, who a judge ruled last month has no credibility as a news source, from telling his viewers that no such case exists.

Tucker was, as you may expect, complaining about Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which had its first session on Monday. The favored talking point among Fox News hosts has been that Democrats are attacking Barrett’s religious practices — but only Republicans talked about her religious faith during Monday’s session. So Tucker instead complained about the Democrats’ focus on Barrett’s threat to Obamacare.

Before we get to Tucker Carlson’s false statements on the matter, a factual rundown of the situation. In 2017, Congress passed an amendment to the ACA that cut the tax penalty for not having insurance, and then 18 Republican-controlled states sued on the grounds that the lack of a penalty nullifies the individual mandate provision of the law — and, consequently, the entirety of Obamacare.

And in June, Trump’s Justice Department filed suit along those same lines. Solicitor General Noel Francisco wrote in the filing that “Nothing the 2017 Congress did demonstrates it would have intended the rest of the ACA to continue to operate in the absence of these three integral provisions,” and thus that “the entire ACA thus must fall with the individual mandate.”

The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments on this case on Nov. 10.

Those being the facts, Tucker Carlson made several statements on this topic to begin his show on Monday night are demonstrably false. After playing several clips of Democratic senators on the Judiciary Committee decrying the ongoing Republican attempts to eliminate Obamacare, Tucker sarcastically declared that, “Well, it sounds like Obamacare is going away if ACB gets on the court.”

And then he made several misleading or outright false statements in a row.

“But it’s not, actually. That’s the amazing thing. Obamacare isn’t really at risk,” Carlson falsely claimed. “There is no case currently pending anywhere in this country before any court in America that would eliminate Obamacare.”

Then he tried to claim we don’t know what Barrett thinks about the Affordable Care Act.

“Nor, by the way, do we have any idea how Amy Coney Barrett would rule in a case like that were it to materialize, which again it hasn’t,” Tucker claimed, even though in 2017 Barrett wrote an essay in a University of Notre Dame law journal criticizing the Supreme Court’s 2012 decision to uphold Obamacare.

From there, Tucker decided to make the misleading claim that, actually, it’s the Democrats who want to get rid of Obamacare since many of them are in favor of Medicare-for-all.

“Democrats themselves have spent most of the past two years publicly conceding that Obamacare is a disaster. Six of the ten Democrats currently as of today’s sitting on the Judiciary Committee in the senate, that’s the same committee that convened today to consider Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination, six of the ten co-sponsored Medicare-for-all legislation. That legislation would have completely abolished Obamacare along with all private health insurance,” Tucker complained.

It is true that Medicare-for-all would replace Obamacare, but a court case would simply eliminate it with no replacement plan. The Trump administration currently does not have a health care plan of its own written down — at least not one that does anything that Obamacare doesn’t already do.

You can watch the quoted portion of Monday’s episode of “Tucker Carlson Tonight” in the clip embedded in this article.

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