There’s an old joke that the definition of quandary is when your mother-in-law drives off a cliff in your new car.
But since I’m not married, I can’t use that joke.
Besides, I’m a policy wonk, so the type of quandary that catches my attention is when the Obama Administration delays big parts of Obamacare (hooray!), but does so by cavalierly deciding to disregard the law (boo!).
Unfortunately, this isn’t a joke.
I wrote about this topic last month and asserted that one of “the defining characteristics of a civilized government is adherence to the rule of law.”
Why is this important? Here’s some of George Will’s analysis of how Obama is subverting the law.
President Obama’s increasingly grandiose claims for presidential power are inversely proportional to his shriveling presidency. …at last week’s news conference he offered inconvenience as a justification for illegality. …Serving as props in the scripted charade of White House news conferences, journalists did not ask the pertinent question: “Where does the Constitution confer upon presidents the ‘executive authority’ to ignore the separation of powers by revising laws?” The question could have elicited an Obama rarity: brevity. Because there is no such authority.
Will then cites the infamous example of Nixon arguing that, “when the president does it, that means it is not illegal” and compares that to Obama’s lawlessness.
Nixon’s claim, although constitutionally grotesque, was less so than the claim implicit in Obama’s actions regarding the ACA. Nixon’s claim was confined to matters of national security or (he said to Frost) “a threat to internal peace and order of significant magnitude.” Obama’s audacity is more spacious; it encompasses a right to disregard any portion of any law pertaining to any subject at any time when the political “environment” is difficult.
And he also dings Obama for creating – out of thin air – a special handout for members of Congress and their staffs.
…his complicity in effectively rewriting the ACA for the financial advantage of self-dealing members of Congress and their staffs. …Obama directed the Office of Personnel Management, which has no power to do this, to authorize for the political class special subsidies unavailable for less privileged and less affluent citizens. If the president does it, it’s legal? “Exactly, exactly.”
Charles Krauthammer is equally uncomfortable with the erosion of the rule of law. His column includes a good summary of how Obamacare is being arbitrarily enforced. Or, to be more accurate, how it’s not being enforced.
…the administration…unilaterally waived Obamacare’s cap on a patient’s annual out-of-pocket expenses — a one-year exemption for selected health insurers that is nowhere permitted in the law. It was simply decreed by an obscure Labor Department regulation. Which followed a presidentially directed 70-plus percent subsidy for the insurance premiums paid by congressmen and their personal staffs — under a law that denies subsidies for anyone that well-off. Which came just a month after the administration’s equally lawless suspension of one of the cornerstones of Obamacare: the employer mandate. Which followed hundreds of Obamacare waivers granted by Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius to selected businesses, unions and other well-lobbied, very special interests.
He then accurately explains that we are entering an unpleasant world where the law is not what’s written, but whatever politicians arbitrarily decide on any given day.
The point is whether a president, charged with faithfully executing the laws that Congress enacts, may create, ignore, suspend and/or amend the law at will. …Such gross executive usurpation disdains the Constitution. It mocks the separation of powers. And most consequentially, it introduces a fatal instability into law itself. If the law is not what is plainly written, but is whatever the president and his agents decide, what’s left of the law? The problem is not just uncertain enforcement but the undermining of the very creation of new law. What’s the point of the whole legislative process — of crafting various provisions through give-and-take negotiation — if you cannot rely on the fixity of the final product, on the assurance that the provisions bargained for by both sides will be carried out?
He closes by noting that Obama seems quite proud of his illegal behavior and he warns that America is becoming a banana republic.
…this president is not only untroubled by what he’s doing, but open and rather proud. As he tells cheering crowds on his never-ending campaign-style tours: I am going to do X — and I’m not going to wait for Congress. That’s caudillo talk. That’s banana republic stuff. In this country, the president is required to win the consent of Congress first. At stake is not some constitutional curlicue. At stake is whether the laws are the law. And whether presidents get to write their own.
Here’s some of what I wrote a couple of years ago to describe the banana republic of Argentina.
…the problem is crony capitalism. Argentina’s economy, for all intents and purposes, is one giant Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac/Obamacare/General Motors/Goldman Sachs Obamaesque dystopia. Government has enormous influence over every major economic decision. It’s like being in the middle of Atlas Shrugged, as political connections are the way to get rich. This type of approach is far worse than the Scandinavian welfare state. Yes, the official size of government is bigger in places such as Sweden, but the negative role of government intervention is far more pervasive in Argentina.
But I actually understated the problem.
Much of what I wrote was a critique of interventionism and the corruption that is facilitated by big government.
That’s part of what defines a banana republic (with Obamacare being a perfect example), but arbitrary law is another characteristic.
And that’s what’s so worrisome about what the Obama Administration is doing.
