President Barack Obama is at it again. Now he’s unilaterally, without legal authority, delaying another aspect of Obamacare. He’s having his IRS—his Un-American Activities Committee (at least the members of HUAC were elected by us)—not enforce through tax collections a provision that prohibits employers from providing better health benefits to top executives than to other employees. His excuse is that, four years after Obamacare was enacted, the IRS hasn’t bothered to write the rules that would effect the collections.
This isn’t the only section of Obamacare that Obama has chosen to…waive. He has chosen to waive for an entire year the Employer Mandate. He has chosen to waive for three months enforcement of the Individual Mandate. He has chosen to waive, for a time, the Small Business mandate. He has chosen to waive, for a time, provisions that forced cancelation of existing policies that individuals already had and preferred—and begun browbeating insurers into allowing those plans to be renewed if a customer wishes. He has chosen to provide hardship exemptions, for a year, for those who find buying an Obamacare policy a hardship. He has chosen….
The Obamacare law is quite specific on these provisions: each one must occur; there are no caveats or except-fors that say “no need to enforce if it’s inconvenient to do so, no need if it’s politically expedient to do otherwise.” Similarly, the Constitution is quite specific: Art II, Section 3 requires the President to take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed. No weasel words here, either, about picking and choosing those laws or those parts of laws that can be ignored whenever the President feels like it. If Obama, or any President, doesn’t like a law or a part of a law, he must go to Congress and persuade them to pass appropriate legislation making the desired modification.
Whatever we might think of the “benefits” of any aspect of Obamacare or of the “fairness” of any section of it, it is, as the Democrats are wont to say, the law of the land. It takes a lawless, arrogant President to choose, on his own recognizance, which parts of a law will not be enforced.
Obama has transformed his own signature law, his very legacy, into a monument to Executive lawlessness.