On Monday, the Obama administration announced that it would be
delaying one of the key components of Obamacare yet again. This time,
the Treasury Department stated that mid-sized employers – businesses
with between 50 and 99 employees – would be able to avoid paying for
employee insurance without a fine until 2016. Larger companies could
still avoid a fine so long as they pay for the insurance of 70 percent
of their full-time workers.
None of this was in the original Affordable Care Act. But recognizing
that employers were about to begin slashing employee hours to avoid
having to pay for insurance, the Obama administration moved to mitigate
the political impact in anticipation of the 2014 elections.
It’s no shock to see commentators like Charles Krauthammer condemning
the president’s usurpation of constitutional authority; Krauthammer
rightly called Obama’s actions “
stuff you do in a banana republic.” It’s no surprise when the
Wall Street Journal
editorial board explains that terming the Affordable Care Act
“Obamacare” makes sense because “the law increasingly means whatever
President Obama says it does on any given day.”
But even Ron Fournier of National Journal has now said he is
“getting sick of defending Obamacare,” and added that it is “getting
difficult and slinking toward impossible to defend the Affordable Care
Act.” The fact that Obama’s quasi-dictatorial actions only put his
allies in the “slinking toward impossible” camp rather than the outright
opposition only speaks to the depth of Obama worship that still
predominates on the intellectually dishonest left.
But it is precisely the left’s intellectual dishonesty that has
allowed Obamacare to move forward. Obamacare is easily the most lawless
piece of legislation ever foisted on the American people. Manipulated
and processed, chopped and reassembled, Obamacare has become a devil’s
playground for arbitrary government – and it hasn’t even come into full
force and effect.
The lawlessness began with the passage of Obamacare itself, which
relied on a combination of bribery and election theft in order to gain
the necessary votes. The bill originally included the so-called
Cornhusker Kickback – a basic payoff to the state of Nebraska – in order
to earn the vote of Sen. Ben Nelson (D-NE). While the Cornhusker
Kickback was later repealed in committee, the damage had already been
done: with Nelson on the record for the bill, he couldn’t politically
backtrack. Similarly, Sen. Bill Nelson (D-FL) originally handed over his
Obamacare vote in return for avoiding cuts to Medicare Advantage in
Florida, before that provision of the bill was killed in conference –
the so-called Gator-Aid payoff. Then there was the Louisiana Purchase,
in which Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-LA) effectively sold her Obamacare vote
in return for
$4.3 billion in Medicaid funds.
Even so, the Democrats didn’t have 60 votes on Obamacare until Sen.
Norm Coleman (R-MN) was cheated out of his seat with endless voting
recounts. Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) entered the Senate, putting the
Democrats at 60 votes – even though the most liberal state in America,
Massachusetts, had just elected a Republican to fill Teddy Kennedy’s
seat largely on the basis of opposition to Obamacare. Obamacare was
quickly passed without anyone reading the final bill – House Speaker
Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) infamously said that we had to pass the bill to find
out what was in it. And Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) rammed
through a vote on Obamacare just before Christmas 2009 to avoid
blowback from the American people when Senators went home for the
holidays. Both Pelosi and Reid used myriad procedural conjurings in
order to pass the bill. And, of course, the Democrats lied to the public
about the costs of the bill in order to avoid further public scrutiny,
just as President Obama lied about being able to keep both your health
insurance plan and your doctor.
The lawlessness extended to the Supreme Court, where Supreme Court
Chief Justice John Roberts issued an opinion that ranks alongside Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857), Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), and Roe v. Wade (1973)
in the moral and legal lowlights of American jurisprudence. Justice
Roberts somehow turned what was a fine for failure to purchase a health
insurance plan – constitutionally impermissible – into a tax, which was
constitutionally permissible. That despite the fact that Obamacare was
pitched again and again as a non-tax by Democrats in order to pass the bill. Suddenly, the government mandating that you buy something simply because you’re breathing was legitimated under the lie that it constituted a tax.
Once the bill became law, the true lawlessness began. Recognizing the
politically unpalatable nature of Obamacare early, even to his allies,
President Obama quickly began
issuing waivers to friends, particularly union cronies. In July 2013, he delayed the implementation of the Obamacare employer mandate until 2015 –
quite illegally, as it turns out. In November 2013, after criticism of the administration arose due to mass cancellations of individual insurance plans,
Obama unilaterally declared that insurance companies could keep selling plans that were not permitted under Obamacare. Then, in December 2013, he
delayed the individual mandate for some thanks to the botched Obamacare rollout.
The growth of the imperial presidency with regard to Obamacare
represents one of the ugliest blemishes on the face of our republic. In
fact, it demonstrates that the checks and balances that once protected
Americans’ rights have been stripped away by an executive branch
hell-bent on power, a judicial branch hell-bent on passing the buck, and
a legislative branch hell-bent on re-election via delegation of
authority to the executive and the judicial. That spells doom for the
concept of rule of law. If no one can be held to the standard of the
Constitution, the Constitution is rendered meaningless. And if the
Constitution is rendered meaningless, the rule of men replaces the rule
of law.
The lawlessness of Obamacare continues unabated. A seven-foot-high
stack of law and regulations can be twisted and turned to fit any
perspective – or, if you’re President Obama, redlined post-facto in
violation of the Constitution. The law itself is lawless; the
implementation is lawless; the slicing and dicing is lawless. But the
concept of the rule of law no longer applies in the world of big,
arbitrary, all-encompassing government.
![NEOCASTRISMO [Hacer click en la imagen]](http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_5jy0SZhMlaU/SsuPVOlq2NI/AAAAAAAAH1E/4xt2Bwd2reE/S150/ppo+saturno+jugando+con+sus+hijos.jpg)
