How President Obama is flouting Obamacare

How President Obama is flouting Obamacare

Every time the White House undercuts one provision of Obamacare, there is a massive ripple effect on other provisions. It’s generally a zero-sum game: When someone gains, someone else loses. Example: When employers are relieved of their mandate to provide insurance, taxpayers risk having to subsidize more of those companies’ employees.

The administration asserts that it can make these changes under the president’s broad executive authority. Yet critics make a compelling argument that the president is stretching the limits. Former federal appellate Judge Michael McConnell, director of the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School, writes in The Wall Street Journal about a different sort of mandate: the mandate in Article II of the Constitution that the president “’shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.’ This is a duty, not a discretionary power. … As the Supreme Court wrote long ago (Kendall v. United States, 1838), allowing the president to refuse to enforce statutes ‘would be clothing the president with a power to control the legislation of Congress, and paralyze the administration of justice.’”