Obamacare: Can Barack Obama postpone the healthcare mandate without going to the Congress first?

 I guess the answer to that question is yes because that is exactly what the Treasury Department did yesterday, but does he actually have the authority to do so? At least one Congressman, Steve King, does not think the Treasury Department (probably acting on the behest of the president) can do this without Congressional approval.

  Here is what he had to say:

“If President Obama wants to make changes to ObamaCare, he must come to Congress,” Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) said on Wednesday.

“Two years ago, the Obama Administration, through a memo from a Homeland Security Department bureaucrat, declared it would not enforce our nation’s immigration laws. Now the Obama Administration, through a blog post by an Assistant Secretary in the Treasury Department, is declaring it won’t even enforce its own health care law on employers. 

“We live in a Constitutional Republic. We are a nation governed by laws written by Congress, not memos and blog posts written by bureaucrats,” King said.

    Steve King gave us one example of the president acting on his own but there are many more: Barack Obama decided not to enforce DOMA before it was overturned by the Supreme Court, he acted on his own in Libya, Syria, and Egypt, and he is trying to use the EPA to create cap and trade laws which do not exist, so this is not a foreign idea to this president. With the lack of push back from Republicans it is easy to see why he feels he can do whatever he wants to do.

  Barack Obama unilaterally decided to postpone the employer healthcare mandate because he did not want a heated political debate so shortly before the election because it would highlight the failings of the healthcare reform law and possibly hurt the Democrats in the midterm election. He figured that by doing this on his own the issue would fade away into the night with little controversy and would not end up being a campaign issue on which Republicans could gain momentum. And it will fade away if the Republicans fail to act.

  By refusing to enforce the law the Treasury Department is basically rewriting the law and as we all know laws are written and passed by the Congress. That is what happened in this case and Barack Obama signed healthcare reform into law and now he should either live with the consequences or admit his mistake and ask the Congress to fix it for him. But he apparently feels as if he is above that.

  The only question is: will the weak-kneed elitist Republicans in Washington actually try to do something about this or will they do what they usually do and talk a good game while doing nothing about the problem?

  Steve King is only one man, he is going to need quite a bit of help and I wonder if the Republicans are up to the task. The Republicans may feel as if they have more to gain politically by using this issue to attack Barack Obama than they do by fixing the problem and if this is the case they will be putting their political ambitions ahead of the needs of the American people and that really is no better than what the Treasury Department announced yesterday.