Is our president ‘required to follow’ even his own law?

Published 11:01 pm Saturday, July 6, 2013

Not that we’re complaining, but how can President Barack Obama unilaterally delay implementation of the Affordable Care Act, now known (even to its proponents) as Obamacare?

Last week, the White House announced it would put off some aspects of the law.

“The Obama administration will not penalize businesses that do not provide health insurance in 2014, the Treasury Department announced Tuesday,” the Washington Post reported. “Instead, it will delay enforcement of a major Affordable Care Act requirement that all employers with more than 50 employees provide coverage to their workers until 2015.”

The why isn’t really in question here. It’s not just that the law is unpopular.

“Employers simply were not ready,” Forbes magazine explains. “The Affordable Care Act, signed into law by President Obama three years ago, required employers with more than 50 full-time workers to provide health benefits or face penalties, beginning next year. The uncertainty and unease of employers came even despite efforts by the Obama administration to ease concerns. Therefore, another year to prepare will go a long way.”

Businesses will certainly appreciate the breathing room. But how can employers believe they won’t be pursued and penalized just from the assurances from a leader who has proven himself untrustworthy on big uses?

And the real question is how: How can the president change a law (which expressly sets out deadlines) by himself?

He can’t — at least, not under our Constitution.

“[The decision] is the latest indication that we do not live under a Rule of Law, but under a Rule of Rulers who write and rewrite laws at whim, without legitimate authority, and otherwise compel behavior to suit their ends,” says the Cato Institute’s Michael Cannon. “Congress gave neither the IRS nor the president any authority to delay the imposition of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act’s employer mandate. In the section of the law creating that mandate, Congress included several provisions indicating the mandate will take effect in 2014.”

Even Obama’s supporters recognize the president doesn’t really have this power.

“This is a regulatory end-run of the legislative process,” writes columnist Ezra Klein in the Washington Post. “The law says the mandate goes into effect in 2014, but the administration has decided to give it until 2015 by simply refusing to enforce the penalties.”

He goes on to contend, “the regulatory solution reflects the fact that the legislative process around the health-care law is completely broken.”

Klein is right. But that legislative process has been broken from the start. Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius has been issuing “waivers” to various businesses and unions though Congress gave her no such power.

It’s not just Congress; the U.S. Supreme Court has also weighed in and validated the law as it’s written.

What we could be seeing is a president hobbled by history desperately trying to engrave his legacy. He’s always rankled at the limitations placed on him by the Constitution.

“I am not a king,” he complained in January. “I am head of the executive branch of government. I am required to follow the law, and that is what we’ve done.”

A couple of months later, he grumbled, “I am not a dictator; I’m the president.”

He now seems to have rejected those limitations.

The deferral of this law, and its sweeping impact on businesses, is difficult to accept as genuine, but even worse, it appears to been another political maneuver to be resolved after mid-term congress- ional elections.

So let’s not celebrate too early the reprieve granted to us outside the bounds of our president’s powers. Let’s view it with great caution.