It is becoming increasingly apparent that President Obama’s notion of governance is that federal laws should be passed to cover as much of human life as possible, and that he should then decide which of those laws to enforce, when, and against whom. The latest example of Obama’s selective enforcement of oppressive legislation is his decree that Obamacare’s hated individual mandate won’t be enforced for those who didn’t have Obamacare-compliant insurance during the 4-month stretch from January through April of this year. This, despite the fact that Obamacare’s actual text states that anyone who goes even three consecutive months without Obamacare-compliant insurance in this year must pay the penalty established in law for violating the individual mandate. A 2-month grace period in law has therefore become a 4-month grace period in practice.
Obama likes to talk about taking matters into his own hands if Congress won’t do what he wants (the constitutional separation of powers notwithstanding). Yet just two months ago, the House of Representatives passed legislation to delay the individual mandate (specifically, to make its penalty $0 for this year), doing so by a margin of 90 votes (250 to 160) — or 83 more than the 7-vote margin (219 to 212) by which the Democrats passed Obamacare in the first place. Moreover, 27 Democrats voted for the individual-mandate delay. Shortly before that vote, however, the White House issued a statement in which it said that if Obama were presented with the legislation (which would require Harry Reid to allow a vote on it in the Senate, which he hasn’t), “he would veto it.” Now, just two months later, Obama has taken it upon himself to pronounce, extralegally, that there will be a 2-month delay to the individual mandate — instead of kicking in on March 1, as the text of the law would seem to require, it will kick in on May 1.
