“… he shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed …[.]” That phrase comes directly from the US Constitution, Article II, Section 3. The “he” refers to the president of the United States. This phrase leaves no wiggle room, no personal discretion or interpretation, no “way out” if a law that has been passed by Congress, but it’s not ready to or
can’t be implemented. It must be faithfully executed. Yet ignoring what is in the US Constitution is exactly what has recently happened with the employer mandate portion of the abomination that is the Affordable Care Act, better known as ObamaCare. And what is currently going on.
You remember, the bill that had to be passed in order for us to see what was/is in it. You know, the scheme that has been sooooooooooo successful lately – at spending taxpayer money, not at enrolling citiens.
Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius said about ObamaCare in August 2013:
This is no longer a political debate; this is what we call the law. It was passed and signed three years ago. It was upheld by the Supreme Court a year ago. The president was re-elected. This is the law of the land.
Section 1513(d) of the Affordable Care Act states that “The amendments made by this section shall apply to months beginning after December 31, 2013.”
Employer mandate implementation is now proposed to be delayed until 2015, after the 2014 mid-term elections. White House political hacks David Axelrod and Valerie Jarrett are defending the delay. Axelrod said:
[Obama’s] ‘view is that we ought to plow forward, make sure this can work, and we’re going to look back at it [the delay], and it’s going to be our proudest accomplishment’.
Jarrett wrote:
We have heard the concern that the reporting called for under the law about each worker’s access to and enrollment in health insurance requires new data collection systems and coordination. So we plan to re-vamp and simplify the reporting process. [emphasis mine]
I guess it would be unreasonable to expect Sebelius and Axelrod and Jarrett to read, understand, and follow the US Constitution.
Obama administration officials said that other aspects of the law won’t be delayed. But guess what! Although the federally-run small business mandate marketplaces started October 1, small businesses won’t be able to enroll online until November.
Regarding the law of the land, Stanford Law School Professor Michael McConnell wrote:
Article II, Section 3, of the Constitution states that the president ‘shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.’ This is a duty, not a discretionary power. While the president does have substantial discretion about how to enforce a law, he has no discretion about whether to do so. [emphases in the original]
[McConnell continued:] The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which advises the president on legal and constitutional issues, has repeatedly opined that the president may decline to enforce laws he believes are unconstitutional. But these opinions have always insisted that the president has no authority, as one such memo put it in 1990, to ‘refuse to enforce a statute he opposes for policy reasons‘. [emphasis mine]
[McConnell continued:] Of all the stretches of executive power Americans have seen in the past few years, the president’s unilateral suspension of statutes may have the most disturbing long-term effects. As the Supreme Court said long ago (Kendall v. United States, 1838), allowing the president to refuse to enforce statutes passed by Congress ‘would be clothing the president with a power to control the legislation of congress, and paralyze the administration of justice’.
The Supreme Court, in 1998, struck down a congressional grant of line-item veto authority to the president to cancel spending items in appropriations. Associate Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens wrote “There is no provision in the Constitution that authorizes the president to enact, to amend, or to repeal statutes.” [emphasis mine]
No less than Dr. Charles Krauthammer agrees. On The O’Reilly Factor, Krauthammer said
that “… the postponement of certain provisions of the law – including the delay until 2015 of the requirements that employers provide coverage to employees …” is unconstitutional.
As William Sullivan wrote about ObamaCare:
What we are seeing today is a late reaction to a century in which progressives thoroughly corrupted our purest ideals of individualism and liberty and transformed government’s role — without amending the Constitution to allow the government to usurp the power it seized. [emphasis mine]
Where is the Department of Justice (DOJ) on this? It is, after all, responsible for the enforcement of the law of the land. DOJ is headed by an Obama appointee, that political hack Eric Holder. Holder must get Obama’s approval before using the bathroom, so ANY action Obama takes will be fine with Holder.
And, if a woman ever gets elected President, will Democrats argue that “she” is not bound by the US Constitution since it clearly states in Article II states that “he” has specific duties? Democrats will argue, like a certain past president, that it all depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is. Will the US Supreme Court buy that argument? Let us pray that this situation will never arise.