BOOM: 38 Senators File Lawsuit Against Obamacare

BOOM: 38 Senators File Lawsuit Against Obamacare

BOOM: 38 Senators File Lawsuit Against Obamacare

Despite the Supreme Court upholding Obamacare already, it is still being challenged in court on numerous fronts.
Hobby Lobby is leading the charge on the religious liberty front, challenging the provision mandating the inclusion of abortion inducing medications in employer sponsored health insurance plans.
The law is also being challenged over some of President Obama’s unilateral changes to the law, such as exempting members of Congress and their staffs from parts of the law and providing them with subsidies, despite their above-average salaries.
Senator Ron Johnson from Wisconsin filed a lawsuit against Obamacare in January, saying Obama exceeded his authority by exempting Congress from the law.  Sen. Johnson has now been joined by 38 other Senators in support of his lawsuit, according to the Washington Times.

The lawmakers have signed onto a legal brief in support of a lawsuit filed by Sen. Ron Johnson, the Wisconsin Republican who is asking a federal court to overturn Obamacare’s special treatment for members of Congress and their staffs.
“The unlawful executive action at issue in this case is not an isolated incident,” the brief states. “Rather, it is part of an ongoing campaign by the executive branch to rewrite the Affordable Care Act on a wholesale basis.”
The brief contends that, if left unchecked, the administration’s campaign “threatens to subvert the most basic precept of our system of government.”
“The president of the United States is constitutionally obligated to take care that the law be faithfully executed; he does not have the power to modify or ignore laws that have been duly enacted by Congress and that he believes are constitutional,” the friend-of-the-court brief states.

The lawsuit is challenging the administration’s authority to give exemptions and subsidies to members of Congress and their staffs, who are able to pay for coverage themselves without a subsidy.  The lawsuit also challenges the mandates that force people to do things they may consider illegal, unethical or immoral.

The amicus brief offers several examples in which Mr. Obama used “non-existent authority” to rewrite the Affordable Care Act, including the revision of the individual mandate, the suspension and revision of the employer mandate, the revision and suspension of the law regulating insurance plans, the unauthorized expansion of federal subsidies, and the suspension of the Medicaid maintenance-of-effort provision.

Senator Johnson wrote an op-ed recently detailing how Democrats came up with the idea of an exemption once they “realized how harmful Obamacare actually was.”

“Relief came in the form of a special tax treatment available only to them, granted in a manner that exceeded the president’s legal and constitutional authority,” Mr. Johnson said.
“Under a rule issued by the president’s Office of Personnel Management, unlike millions of their countrymen who have lost coverage and must now purchase insurance through an exchange, members and their staffs will now receive an employer contribution to help pay for their new plans,” the senator from Wisconsin wrote.

The President certainly doesn’t have the authority to rewrite the law in order to help his friends and allies, or to provide special favors for his benefactors.  For a President that always talks about equality, this exemption of Congress from certain Obamacare mandates is the height of unfairness.
Congress should not be exempt from any portion of Obamacare.  In fact, Congress should not be exempt from any law that they write that would affect the American people.  To wit, Senator Rand Paul has introduced a constitutional amendment that would ban Congress from creating laws that don’t apply equally to them as well as the American people.
More Senators, and Representatives from the House, need to sign on and join this lawsuit.  The President can’t change laws without Congress, and Congress should no longer allow him to do it without consequence.