By Bill Wilson
Barack Obama is in a box: He repeatedly promised “if you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan,” but his socialized medicine monstrosity has cost millions of people their coverage. It’s also become painfully clear Obama knew this was going to happen as early as March 2010 — yet kept regurgitating his false promise.
Obamacare also has a bigger problem: As written, the law’s key mechanism for issuing subsidies to state exchanges is legally enforceable in only one third of the country — meaning the only way to pay for its nationwide dependency expansion is new deficit spending. This would clearly violate another oft-repeated Obama promise: That his law would not “add one dime” to the federal deficit (well, beyond the $6.2 trillion identified in this 2013 GAO report).
What’s an administration to do, right?
That’s easy: Change the law.
“As we implement this law, we have and will continue to make changes as needed,” senior administration official Valerie Jarrett wrote this summer.
And so Obama has shredded the Constitution in favor of the “Easy Button,” arbitrarily remaking entire sections of the health care law that deal with its employer mandate, its deductible and co-payment limits, its coverage requirements and — more disturbingly — its power to subsidize health insurance in more than thirty states.
Consider this: Obamacare itself contains 906 pages and approximately 380,000 words. But the regulations promulgated in support of the law total 10,535 pages and approximately 11,588,500 words.
U.S. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky) hit the nail on the head earlier this year in responding to this systematic obliteration of our nation’s constitutionally prescribed separation of powers.
“The president doesn’t get to write legislation, and its illegal and unconstitutional for him to try and change legislation by himself,” Paul told Fox News.
He’s right. Yet sadly this sort of crass usurpation is nothing new for Obama – whose contempt for the rule of law is unprecedented in American history. For example, after multiple Congresses (including a Democratically controlled Congress) refused to enact his proposed energy tax Obama went over their heads.
“If Congress won’t act soon to protect future generations, I will,” he said in his 2013 State of the Union address. “I will direct my Cabinet to come up with executive actions we can take.”
Last month he made good on that threat — forming a new Democratic-controlled environmental panel designed to “skirt legislative oversight” and “push a federal agenda on states” as part of a “sweeping overhaul” of American environmental policy, according to one report.
After Congress refused to pass Obama’s DREAM Act in 2011 Obama unilaterally imposed the measure himself — effectively granting legal status to millions of undocumented immigrants.
Without Congressional approval Obama’s administration pledged last month to indefinitely extend America’s failed military intervention in Afghanistan — one of several foreign lands where Central Intelligence Agency operators have conducted extralegal killings (the evidence of which has been kept hidden from taxpayers).
Just as egregiously, Obama’s Internal Revenue Service unfairly discriminated against his political opponents in the years leading up to his reelection — illegally targeting them for “added scrutiny” and then covering up the scandal until after the election.
Last month Obama applauded Sen. Harry Reid’s decision to undo two centuries of democratic tradition in the U.S. Senate — part of a crass effort to further radicalize the federal government by eliminating a critical check on executive overreach (one Obama previously embraced as a member of the U.S. Senate).
And in perhaps the most dangerous example of them all, Obama has empowered his National Security Agency to intercept, store and access billions of phone records, emails, text messages, website histories and online interactions of American citizens in direct contravention of their constitutional protections against warrantless search and seizure.
In each of these actions Obama’s modus operandi is clear: Centralized power, by any means necessary.
America was built on the rule of law — indispensable liberties articulated by the Magna Carta and Anglo-Saxon common law and expanded upon during the American Revolution, the U.S. Civil War and the civil rights movement. Obama’s arrogant disregard for the rule of law is destroying this shared heritage. It is breaking the bonds of civil society — fueling the very distrust and contempt for government Obama professes to abhor.
This alien ideology — which will take generations to erase from our national identity – is the true legacy of the Obama regime. And Obamacare represents its shining “achievement.”
Bill Wilson is a member of the board of directors of Americans for Limited Government.
