Any law he doesn't like he simply disregards and somehow he gets away with it. I can't imagine any other president, certainly no Republican president, flouting the law like Mr. Obama does without the media hounding him out of office.
His latest foray into rule by executive fiat is his decision to suspend anti-fraud measures built into the Affordable Care Act:
President Barack Obama’s health care requires that applicants applying for tax subsidies for health insurance prove that their income was somewhere between 100 percent to 400 percent of the federal poverty line. The bill also requires that applicants prove that they weren’t receiving employer-provided insurance.The Affordable Care Act is the law, as regrettable as that may be, and we are, or should be, a nation of laws. Disregarding ACA's provisions is a violation of the presidential oath of office in which the president vows to uphold the Constitution and, by implication, the laws of the land. It would be as if Congress passed the Clean Air Act or the Civil Rights Act and a Republican president simply refused to enforce it.
But HHS decided last week to suspend these anti-fraud measures.
The administration will now “rely on self-reported data,” the Washington Examiner’s Philip Klein writes.
“You read that correctly. A man who earns $50,000 per year and gets insurance through his employer could log on to the new government website and say he earns $20,000 and gets no insurance through his employer, and the government would not even attempt to confirm that the information is accurate before forking over generous taxpayer subsidies,” Klein adds.
If you thought Medicare and Medicaid fraud was bad, wait until Obamacare goes into full effect sans its anti-fraud provisions.
True, as the Washington Post’s Sarah Kliff and Sandhya Somashekharand explain, anyone caught defrauding Obamacare could be fined up to $25,000 and be forced to “repay any excess subsidies they received.” But how are you going to catch them?
“With this news coming after the employer mandate delay announcement, the Obama administration has now openly conceded that it is in way over its head when it comes to implementing this unworkable law,” Klein notes.
In the wake of the president's announcement that he will suspend the employer mandate in Obamacare and now the announcement that he will suspend the requirement that income must be verified before subsidies are granted, how can any Republican member of Congress be expected to vote for any legislation advanced by the Democrat party given that no one knows whether any provisions in that legislation would ever be enforced by the executive? It seems to me that unless democrats win the House in 2014 no legislation will go anywhere in Congress for the next three years and that the only way Mr. Obama is going to get anything done is by executive dictat, just as is done in third-world banana republics.
Mr. Obama is setting a terrible example for American citizens by encouraging disrespect and disdain for the law. How many citizens will be tempted to rationalize to themselves that if the president can decide which laws to honor so can they, and commence their foray into lawlessness by lying about their income in order to receive insurance subsidies or by cheating on their taxes? If the president is seen as contemptuous of both the democratic process and the rule of law why should the average citizen feel any differently?
