By Tom Toth
Barack Obama has compromised the Oval Office by abandoning his Constitutional role as Chief Executive in exchange for that of a self-limiting, autocratic Head of State, enforcing the United States Code at the whim of his own hubris.
Today, the president took to his podium to announce that the federal government would no longer enforce a portion of the almost three-year old healthcare law and single-handedly allow people to keep their previous healthcare plans for a year. In doing so, Obama conceded that his promise to the American people that “if you like your healthcare plan, you can keep it” was a lie; proving that, when challenged, he will stop at nothing to preserve his own political legacy, even at the expense of the rule of law.
Further still, Obama announced this decision before Congress could pass legislation.
Both Representative Fred Upton’s (R-MI) bill in the House and another bill in the Senate, would have either allowed or mandated that health insurers reinstate policies dismantled by Obamacare, although neither would have actually fixed the problem. Both Obama’s fiat declaration and the congressional fixes failed to acknowledge that Obamacare has already destroyed the customer pools from which the insurance plans were previously funded.
Not even Obama can just wave a magic wand and bring back the destroyed insurance programs, but any plan working through Congress would have at least maintained legal integrity and abided by the limitations of the Constitution. Instead of putting his support behind a bill and respecting the limitations of the Oval Office to the rule of law, he acted unilaterally to cover his own mistakes from the American people and proved that his arrogance ultimately reigns supreme in Washington.
Today’s events make one wonder — under Obama’s understanding of the law, what exactly are the limits of his executive authority? The president’s actions suggest that laws and the legislature exist for no purpose beyond passing suggestions for his executive agencies of enforcement to consider. Perhaps the next President, under the same precedent, could take to the same podium and render Obamacare, or any other law, nullified by executive edict.
Barack Obama doesn’t seem to understand that the standards of American jurisprudence cannot be altered according to whims or to align with his past words or false promises. The President sold the Affordable Care Act based on false pretenses, and the majority of the people’s elected representatives failed to critically analyze the bill and passed it. The president released control of the bill that directly conflicted with his promises when he signed it into law, and now the rules of our constitutional republic mandate that we live with the consequences until changes to the law are approved by the people through their representatives in Congress.
Like Obama’s word, the Affordable Care Act is irreparable. For the sake of each American, especially the millions of newly uninsured currently suffering under Obamacare’s damaging mandates, the law needs to be promptly repealed. Each elected official on Capitol Hill voting for anything else does so at his or her own political peril.
Tom Toth is the Social Media Director for Americans for Limited Government
