WASHINGTON – Endorsing the idea that the courts should strike down all of former president Barack Obama's health care law, President Donald Trump said Tuesday that he and the Republicans will embrace the issue ahead of next year's elections.

"The Republican Party will soon be known as the party of health care – you watch," Trump told reporters after the Justice Department asked an appeals court to uphold a Texas judge's decision to invalidate the entire law known as "Obamacare."

Trump tweeted a similar sentiment just minutes before a meeting with Senate Republicans on Capitol Hill.

Democrats said the health care issue helped them reclaim the U.S. House in last year's congressional elections, and it will help them win back the presidency next year – especially if the Obama health care law is struck down.

"Republicans thought they had put a scab on their self-inflicted health care wounds from 2018, but Donald Trump just ripped off the band-aid again by going to court to try and overturn it," said Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson.

The Trump administration told a federal court in New Orleans late Monday that it would ask judges to toss out the entire Affordable Care Act, a decision that cast further uncertainty over the future of a federal law that has extended health insurance to millions of Americans.

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In a letter filed with the Fifth Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals, Justice Department lawyers said that a lower court’s ruling that the health care law is unconstitutional should be affirmed and that the United States “is not urging that any portion of the district court’s judgment to be reversed.”

A coalition of Republican-led states brought a lawsuit, Texas v. United States, arguing the entire health law should be thrown out.

In a ruling last December, U.S. District Court Judge Reed O’Connor in the Northern District of Texas agreed with the GOP-led states' argument that the health law was unconstitutional.

The judge ruled that the constitutional foundation for the law – the requirement that people buy insurance or pay a penalty – was no longer constitutional because Congress had repealed the penalty. O'Connor ruled that because that provision was so central to the health law, the whole thing had to be invalidated.