DEMOCRATS set up health law moves.

House Democrats used their new majority on Thursday to squeeze Republicans on health care, taking the first step to intervene in a court case in which a Texas judge has ruled the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act unconstitutional. That move will be followed by a vote next week designed to force GOP lawmakers into a political corner: agree to defend a law many members have spent years reviling or appear to oppose the law’s popular protections for millions of Americans with pre-existing medical conditions that many have pledged to uphold. “Republicans should end their assault on health care and join us to do the right thing for the American people,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said in announcing the Wednesday vote. Thursday’s authorization was part of a collection of rules the House adopted to guide its operation in the new Congress. It gives Pelosi permission to intervene in the Texas court case and allows the chamber’s counsel to work on the litigation. The House maneuver came hours after a coalition of Democratic attorneys general appealed the ruling by U.S. District Judge Reed O’Connor that the health care law is invalid — starting a process Thursday that could send the law before the Supreme Court for a third time. The appeal by 16 states and the District of Columbia consists of a single paragraph that lays out the legal steps to the appeal. But California Attorney General Xavier Becerra, leading the opponents to the decision, and other coalition members heaped barbed words on the ruling by O’Connor, contending that his opinion is “reckless,” “ludicrous” and based on a legal theory that is “flimsy,” as various attorneys general put it. The appeal comes nearly three weeks after O’Connor issued a decision concluding that all of the Affordable Care Act is invalid because of a recent change in tax law. His reasoning hinges on the fact that a tax bill, passed by Congress at the end of 2017, included a provision that eliminates an Affordable Care Act penalty imposed on Americans who did not comply with the law’s requirement that they have health insurance. The case involves a lawsuit filed a year ago by nearly a score of Republican attorneys general, who argued that without the penalty the Affordable Care Act’s insurance mandate was no longer constitutional because it no longer grew out of Congress’ taxing authority. The suit then argued that the insurance requirement could not be legally separated from the rest of the sprawling statute, so all of it was invalid. O’Connor agreed, writing in his opinion that the coverage mandate “is essential to and inseverable from the remainder of the [Affordable Care Act].” The group of Democratic attorneys general emerged last year as the main defenders of the law when the Trump administration, in an unusual move, announced that it would not defend the law against the lawsuit.