The plainness of the usurpation of power on the part of this administration is obvious, and one wonders how many Democrats — some of whom surely have respect for the rule of law — will continue to abide it. Would any Democrat want a Republican president to view the law — or the scope of executive power to “adjust,” “peel back,” or ignore the law — in this way?
The account, however, also highlights problems on the other side of the aisle. It says, “GOP lawmakers, who oppose the law, seized on the delay to argue the administration should relax other key provisions, including the requirement that individuals carry coverage or pay a penalty, which has been in effect since the beginning of this year.” The New York Times provides an almost identical account: “Republicans denounced the unilateral move as a violation of the law and called on the White House to throw out all of the Affordable Care Act’s coverage mandates.”
This is exactly the wrong response. Republican lawmakers should be insisting that the Obama administration execute the law as written — and should start holding high-profile hearings in the House to have administration officials explain why they don’t think they need to execute the law as written, while having constitutional experts explain why they do. Secondarily, Republicans should insist that the Democratic Senate pass, and Obama sign, actual changes to the law itself — which have already been passed by the House with a fair amount of Democratic support — to delay the individual mandate alongside the employer mandate that the business lobbyists are so “pleasantly astounded” they were able to get delayed in clear violation of the written law itself.
Yes. The Republicans need to continue to insist that the administration follow the law, not just on principle, but to force the Democrats to lie in the bed they unilaterally made. If the Dems want to fix the law, they need to change the law, with both houses of Congress, not “adjust” it.
[Update a few minutes later]
…it is hard to figure out just where the Obama administration is going with all of this.
For employers with more than 50 workers this is a delay not a fix. Employers will only now up the pressure to change the law completely, knowing they have the administration on the political run over these issues. And, small employers will still have to comply with the very costly minimum benefit mandates––really the biggest complaint they have had. Just exactly what is the Obama administration accomplishing with a delay?
What will the administration back off on next? Given the very small exchange enrollment so far coming from the ranks of the uninsured, will they next postpone or eliminate the individual mandate?
No one has been more critical of the various requirements in Obamacare that I have.
But to make an insurance system work you have to have a set of consistent and consistently applied rules. You can’t have some people choosing to be out today and in tomorrow. You can’t have a system where insurers price products based upon one set of conditions and then you keep backing off on the conditions consumers and employers have to follow.
The administration really has three options:
- Full speed ahead––enforce all of the original rules. Just take the political heat believing you have crafted a system that will work. This is what they have been telling us for almost four years now!
- Do a comprehensive and rational fix that provides for a modified system for everyone learning from the mistakes that were made.
- Let it unravel one step at a time caving in to every constituency that threatens a vulnerable Democratic Senator and end up with a worse mess.
Looks to me like they are on track for number three. Ironically, I don’t think these delays will do the Democrats one bit of good for their vulnerable Senators. These aren’t permanent fixes and these concessions will just reinvigorate the people complaining that their cause is justified.
Yes. They’re panicking. And because they’re incompetent, they’re just flailing and playing it by ear at this point, even though they’re completely tone deaf.
[Update a few minutes later]
Adding irrationality to lawlessness:
The officers’ responsibility is to the owners of the company, the shareholders. The business exists to create value, not to provide employment – employing workers is a function of the value added to the enterprise, not the need to create a more favorable election environment for the statist political party. Corporate officers who overlooked material tax consequences would be unfit to be corporate officers.
What is illegal and irrational is not a company’s commonsense deliberation over its costs, it is Obama’s edict. And look what attends this one: criminal prosecution if Obama’s Justice Department decides the business has falsely certified that its staffing decision was not motivated by Obamacare.
Think about that for a second. The waiver is illegal. It flouts the language of the Obamacare statute, under which the employer mandate is required already to have been implemented by now. There is nothing in the law that empowers Obama to waive the mandate, much less to attach lawless conditions to such a lawless waiver. A business that seeks the waiver and fails to pay the mandated tax (in lieu of providing the required coverage) is in violation of federal statutory law, regardless of its compliance with Obama’s outlaw edict. The payments required by the statute, after all, are owed to the public, not to Obama – he’s got no authority to deprive the government of these funds just because it would harm Democrats to collect them.
Yet, Obama proclaims his illegal waiver with impunity – Congress apparently unwilling to stop him. You, on the other hand, will be prosecuted for breaking the “law” if you do not comply to Obama’s satisfaction with the illegal and irrational condition he has unilaterally placed on his illegal waiver.
This is tyranny, plain and simple.
It’s sort of like Erdogan’s style in Turkey.
Republican messaging on the employer mandate is reminiscent of the joke Woody Allen tells in Annie Hall, about the two old Jewish women complaining about a restaurant: “This food is terrible,” says one, “And such small portions!” says the other. For the GOP it’s “This employer mandate is terrible”, and “Obama must not delay it!”.
And for Democrats its, “We can not delay Obamacare. It is the law of the land and only the American Taliban would stand in the way of its implementation.” Then Obama gives a speech, “I am ordering the delay of the implementation of Obamacare and I have altered the deal so that anyone who fires anyone over the next two years has to prove they didn’t do it because of Obamacare or I will destroy their business with the IRS. Pray I do not alter it further.”
The Individual mandate is unpopular, no doubt about that, people don’t really like that part,
but aside from anti-government types, there is no strong feeling on the employer mandate.
You have to stop saying stupid crap. You keep equating “Constitutional government” as envisioned at the founding with “anti-government”. You could say “anti-Democrat-party-type-of-government”, but “anti-government” is completely wrong.
The right doesn’t believe government is the “embodiment of society” or any other such crap. It is supposed to be the law enforcement organization that prosecutes violations of individual rights and that’s pretty much about it.
When someone on the right says “society should help someone”, that doesn’t equate to “government should help someone” because government is not society. Society is an emergent property of everything that occurs in say a country. It is not an entity in and of itself. So saying those in society should help those less fortunate, it means creating charities and donating to them. It doesn’t mean voting yourself other people’s property so that you can live without having to work for it.
Given the GOP led by Ted Cruz shut down the government, the GOP is
generally considered to be anti-Government.
It was the Democrats who shut down the government, you moron.
You mean the government that continued to function with more than half of its staff still employed and working?
The shutdown was not a shutdown, otherwise Washington DC would have been emptied and the federal government would have ceased to exist.
So now comes dn-guy completely supporting the President arbitrarily changing law, and completely unbothered by the fact that no President has that authority. You aren’t bothered by tyranny when it is staring you in the face.
This debate is now larger than whether Team Red or Team Blue has their guy in the White House, and petty partisan bullshit. We are starting to get into a serious Constitutional crisis with a President usurping Congressional authority to make law.
Are you completely unaware of what this is? Put aside the D or the R and look at it as someone who just got done writing the Constitution in 1789 and after just having fought a war against a king a few years before that. How do you think this looks to someone who just had their friends a few years back fight and die to get rid of a king?
Are you really OK with the government arbitrarily telling businesses they have to certify that they aren’t making staffing decisions because of Obamacare? Obamacare is a new cost center. There is absolutely no way for that not to have an impact in hiring decisions. That is illegal for the President to do on his face, first Congress never authorized such action, and even if it did it violates the First Amendment right of a business owner to freely speak, not to mention denigrates everything that was fought for in 1776.
And for the record, yes it is just as bad and wrong if a Republican President did the same thing.
“It was the Democrats who shut down the government”
Please Proceed.
“Are you really OK with the government arbitrarily telling businesses they have to certify that they aren’t making staffing decisions because of Obamacare? ”
Well, they don’t have to. They have the choice to implement Obamacare a year earlier than everyone else while the government isn’t even set up to run the system. The added attention from the IRS and other government agencies all could have been avoided has they not gone against the Obama.
Obama was serious when he said punish our enemies and reward our friends. Obama will dole out special favors to those who don’t get out of line. Of course sometimes staying in line isn’t enough. One must make a special tribute to show you are more worthy than others.
You have to stop saying stupid crap.
Apparently he doesn’t. In fact, he seems incapable of doing anything else.
” there is no strong feeling on the employer mandate.”
And that sir is why it is being delayed until after the 2016 election. It would be a shame if some strong feelings were developed as it is being implemented. Obama says no one is even going to be effected by it so I don’t know why they are delaying it another two years. You do have faith in Obama right?
No strong feeling on the employer mandate? Obama is absolutely terrified of implementing it as written and signed, or he wouldn’t be trampling the Constitution to avoid the disaster.
He should have read the bill before he signed it into law. Wait, that wouldn’t have worked…he has a demonstrated a profound reading comprehension problem as evidenced by his severely limited understanding of the US Constitution.
If Obamacare is so great, why does he keep delaying important parts until after elections? As we’ve seen with the individual mandate, millions of people were forced out of their existing policies. Only a fool would believe the same thing won’t happen with the employer mandate. When Obamacare was signed, he famously tweeted, “It’s the law.” If it’s such a great law, why isn’t he following it.
All the Republicans are doing is following one of Alinski’s Rules for Radicals about making the opposition follow their own rules. Goose, gander, same sauce.
If Obamacare is so great, why does he keep delaying important parts
The employer mandate is not an important part. The important parts — the exchanges, banning discrimination on health status, the subsidies and the individual mandate — have not been delayed.
As we’ve seen with the individual mandate, millions of people were forced out of their existing policies
The individual mandate has nothing to do with forcing people out of existing policies.
“the subsidies and the individual mandate”
Most of us liked our old plans better and people Obama claims as a great success for Obamacare are just people replacing their old plans. In his speech the other day, Obama said the only requirement of Obamacare was that people had insurance and yet millions lost theirs.
“The individual mandate has nothing to do with forcing people out of existing policies.”
That is exactly what it was intended to do. It was designed to force everyone off their old plans and into plans that met the whimsical ideological requirements of Obama and his HHS.
They did this by mandating what plans have to cover and instituting a Chavezesque price control and command industry. It is not some minimal mandate requiring that people have insurance and insurance companies operate in good faith. It is a wide ranging expansion of government powers and interference in the interactions with people, doctors, and businesses.
What new law will Obama make up tomorrow and dictate the country to follow tomorrow?
They did this by mandating what plans have to cover
Yes, but that isn’t the individual mandate. The individual mandate is that (almost) everyone has to have insurance, or pay a penalty.
” The individual mandate is that (almost) everyone has to have insurance, or pay a penalty.”
No it isn’t. It has to be a certain kind of insurance or otherwise I would still have my older and superior plan.
You’re right. The law itself is enough to force people out of their policies.
This is tyranny, plain and simple.
Any repub that doesn’t understand this should be voted out of office. Especially those that say they understand this and don’t.
Those that think this would marginalize the party don’t have a clue about why the voters are sitting out.