As House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., pointed out this week, President Obama is again breaking the law — one he signed himself and bears his name, Obamacare. Ryan and Congress are right to cry foul, for there’s a lot at stake.
The Department of Health and Human Services “circumvented” Congress by illegally diverting billions of dollars from the Treasury to insurance companies in Obamacare’s exchanges.
According to a report from the non-partisan Congressional Research Service, this “would appear to be in conflict with a plain reading of” the law, which states that money collected in excess of a certain amount each year must be handed over to the Treasury.
The House Ways and Means Committee is investigating. The House had an initial success last month in its lawsuit challenging $150 billion in unappropriated insurer subsidies.
As Ryan put it, Obama “basically gave billions of dollars, taxpayer dollars, to insurance companies, to try and make Obamacare look better than it is … and to try to make the premium increases not as high as they otherwise would be.”
For a president who campaigned against the influence of big corporations, and who maligned opponents of Obamacare for supposedly defending large insurers, his illegal bailout is another sign of just how badly his healthcare “reform” is working.
The president’s pilfering from the Treasury softens the blow a bit for insurers who are discovering that they can’t make money under Obamacare’s rules. Taxpayers are having their pockets picked so the president can massage the numbers, limit price hikes and make his signature legislation look less like a dog’s breakfast.
But the main issue here is that Obamacare lawbreaking is another way in which the nation’s chief law officer keeps finding ways to traduce the constitutional limits of his office.
Beginning with his assertion that his change agenda couldn’t wait for Congress, Obama has stretched his authority beyond the breaking point. On immigration, education, healthcare and war, Obama has treated congressional approval as optional. This abuse has not been getting the attention it deserves, or the attention it would be getting if it were a Republican taking such lawless steps.
Obama’s sympathizers should consider that the precedents he sets today make it easier for future occupiers of the Oval Office to do the same or worse, just as he is building on the abuses of his predecessors.
We now have a chief executive who enforces laws that have been rejected rather than passed, and spends money that has not been appropriated, but explicitly denied. His bureaucracy promulgates rules and regulations inconsistent with laws Congress has passed, even ones signed by Obama.
Asking, as one must, whether constitutional lawmaking remains real amounts to asking whether we are a nation of laws or of men. The answer is becoming a bleak one, and there is every reason for concern that it will become bleaker stil.
Ryan was not exaggerating when he referred to the administration “trampling the Constitution.” Congress must find ways to curb an executive branch that was already becoming too powerful before Obama, and is now spiraling out of control.
