About the country’s headlong rush to totalitarianism — are we already there?
This Breitbart analysis refers to an article from the NYT which highlights an incredibly bold action by Obama’s regime. The NYT (shown in red) reports it as almost ‘just another day at the office’. This is certainly not the first successful attempt to neutralize the authority of Congress or the Constitutional separation of powers. That’s precisely what makes the reporting of this clearly lawless action by this administration both stunning yet, ‘business as usual’! Bold emphasis ours.
White House Secretly Squashed IRS Resistance to ObamaCare’s Illegal Subsidies
The New York Times reports on a secret meeting from 2014, exposed thanks to sworn testimony before the House Ways and Means Committee, at which a vanload of IRS officials were told to stifle their complaints about billions of dollars in flagrantly illegal ObamaCare funding.
Upon arrival, the I.R.S. officials, some of whom had expressed doubts that the Obama administration had the proper authority to spend billions of dollars on a crucial element of its [Obamacare] health care law, were ushered into a conference room.
There, they were presented with an Office of Management and Budget memo laying out the administration’s justification for spending $3.9 billion on consumer health insurance subsidies. They were told they could read it but could not take notes or make copies.
The O.M.B. officials left the room to allow their visitors a moment to absorb the document, and then returned to answer a few questions and note that Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. had been briefed and signed off on the legal rationale. (snip)
And yet, the Times article is actually quite blunt about what happened here. . . .
After failing to win congressional approval for the funds, the Obama administration spent the money anyway and has now distributed about $7 billion to insurance companies to offset out-of-pocket costs for eligible consumers. The administration asserts that the health care legislation provided permanent, continuing authority to do so, and that no further appropriation was necessary.
Mr. Fisher, for one, did not agree, and his testimony is the first to reveal that some within the administration challenged the spending. (snip)
“Cost-sharing reduction payments are not linked to the Internal Revenue Code, as far as I could tell, directly anywhere,” Mr. Fisher, now in the private sector, said in his deposition, made public last week by House Democrats who feared Republicans would release selected excerpts.
“There is no linkage to the permanent appropriation, nor is there any link to any other appropriation that was indicating what account these funds should be paid from.” (snip)
It won’t be worth much to partisan Democrats, but Fisher stressed that he’s not opposed to ObamaCare itself — he’s concerned with appropriations law. “For those of us who work in financial management, when it comes to the Antideficiency Act, which has criminal penalties associated with it, we take it very seriously,” he testified.
The Antideficiency Act is an important element of Congress’ “power of the purse,” forbidding federal employees from “making or authorizing an expenditure from, or creating or authorizing an obligation under, any appropriation or fund in excess of the amount available in the appropriation or fund unless authorized by law.”
(snip)
It’s obvious that the Administration knew these subsidies would be legally problematic, especially since they put so much effort into tricking the American people into thinking ObamaCare was “revenue neutral.” Messy legislative fights over multi-billion-dollar subsidies could make voters ornery.
In this, as in so many other ways, Democrats viewed the Affordable Care Act as something akin to an enabling act, a writ of unlimited executive power to do whatever was necessary to keep the government-managed health insurance scheme afloat. They viewed passage of the ACA as a permanent surrender of congressional authority, creating a weird new kind of non-law that could be rewritten by the Executive Branch as needed, in perpetuity.
Keeping ObamaCare alive ultimately required the Supreme Court to rewrite it on the fly, twice. Chief Justice John Roberts might need to break out his erasers and White-Out again.
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The Breitbart article by John Hayward is great, and continues with more devastating analysis, but in case it is lost on others, consider the implications of an administration that with a straight face considers that they have carte blanche to reimburse without appropriation!!
And while the New York Times is unperturbed now, do you remember the days when it had less forebearance . . .
Just What the Founders Feared: An Imperial President Goes to War (published: July 23, 2007, Adam Cohen writing)
The nation is heading toward a constitutional showdown over the Iraq war. Congress is moving closer to passing a bill to limit or end the war, but President Bush insists Congress doesn’t have the power to do it. “I don’t think Congress ought to be running the war,” he said at a recent press conference. “I think they ought to be funding the troops.” He added magnanimously: “I’m certainly interested in their opinion.”
The war is hardly the only area where the Bush administration is trying to expand its powers beyond all legal justification. But the danger of an imperial presidency is particularly great when a president takes the nation to war, something the founders understood well. In the looming showdown, the founders and the Constitution are firmly on Congress’s side.
Given how intent the president is on expanding his authority, it is startling to recall how the Constitution’s framers viewed presidential power. They were revolutionaries who detested kings, and their great concern when they established the United States was that they not accidentally create a kingdom. To guard against it, they sharply limited presidential authority, which Edmund Randolph, a Constitutional Convention delegate and the first attorney general, called “the foetus of monarchy.”
DLH
