By Rick Manning
President Obama owes Ted Cruz and Mike Lee along with House Republicans an apology. He owes the tea party an apology. In fact, he owes all of America an apology.
For weeks, Obama and his minions refused offer after offer that would have delayed implementation of Obamacare for a year. They not only refused to even talk about these concerns, they demonized anyone who even suggested that putting Obamacare on pause might be in everyone’s best interest.
Now, it seems that the Obama Administration is looking to unilaterally waive enforcing the individual mandate portion of the law according to a news briefing provided by Obama press secretary Jay Carney.
Carney promised, that if people remain unable to access health insurance under Obamacare through Healthcare.gov they “will not be penalized” under the individual mandate.
What this means is that this Administration has now effectively announced that they are unilaterally and unconstitutionally delaying the two major portions of the health care law. Earlier this year, an underling at the U.S. Department of Treasury announced through a blog post that they would not be enforcing the employer mandate for a year, and now Carney has effectively announced that no one may need to sign up after all for the individual mandate due to the failure of the Healthcare.gov website.
The only problem is the Administration does not have the power to waive legal requirements under the law no matter how much sense they make.
This is exactly why Obama should approach Cruz, Lee and the tea party on bended knee asking them to bail out his failed experiment by codifying the delays that his own political appointees say are necessary.
Even more troubling in the Healthcare.gov-gate scandal is that Department of Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius claims that Obama never was briefed on the problems with the website. In a CNN interview she says that the President was “blindsided.”
Sebelius also claimed that President Barack Obama wasn’t even made aware that there were potentially major problems with the sign-up portal until it went live on October 1.
Apparently, no one thought it was important to alert Obama to expect an extremely rocky rollout of his signature law, even after the beta test with only a few participants crashed the system.
This is just one more instance where Obama has been kept out of the loop, later claiming that he only learned of the problem when everyone else did.
Obama was a mushroom during the IRS political abuse scandal, claiming to have learned about it from the media.
Of course, this is the same Obama who claimed to have learned from the news media that his Justice Department’s seizure of two months of Associated Press phone records.
And this is the same Obama who previously, had claimed that he learned about the “Fast and Furious” scandal on the same day the public did.
Incredibly, records released after four Americans were killed in Benghazi on 9/11/2012 revealed that the president regularly missed his in-person national security briefings.
So it should come as no surprise to anyone that Obama put the nation through a government shutdown and threatened defaulting on our national debt in order to avoid negotiating a delay of the implementation of Obamacare.
Apparently no one thought to tell him that the law was not ready for roll out, and incredibly, Obama never thought to ask.
Yes, Obama owes Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, the tea party and all of America a prime time apology. Although, it is unlikely anyone will be allowed to type it into his teleprompter.
Rick Manning (@rmanning957) is vice president of public policy and communications for Americans for Limited Government.
