The road from Republic to Dictatorship is paved with “good intentions”, like Obama’s Obamacare delays… By: Vince
The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a watershed piece of legislation in American history. Based on the 15th Amendment, it outlawed discrimination based on racial, ethnic, religious and gender criteria.
You probably don’t realize it, but it’s likely that you encounter aspects of the Civil Rights Act on a regular basis. When you apply for a job, a mortgage, join a club, stay in a hotel room, or buy something online you are often presented with a page of text with a bunch of legalese that you probably don’t read. That text usually says something about non-discrimination, terms and conditions and various other policies. All of that appears because non-discrimination is the law of the land. That means that if a business or group discriminates based on one of those factors, they could be prosecuted by the government. That text you don’t read basically acknowledges as much.
Although Congress passed the Civil Rights Act, it does not enforce it. That is the President’s job. If someone breaks the rules, the Justice Department or the US Civil Rights Commission will most likely be the one that sues them, not some House or Senate committee. It’s the president’s job to execute the laws. That’s because Article II Section 3 states that the president “shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed”.
But what if he didn’t want to do it? Let’s say a president was elected and decided that 50 years was enough and that we didn’t need to focus on discrimination anymore. There would be howls from virtually every quarter of the country. “That’s unconstitutional!”
And of course those howling would be right. Today however, to very few howls, we have the exact same thing, only instead of the Civil Rights Act it’s The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, otherwise known as Obamacare.
President Obama has unilaterally decided that large swaths of his signature legislation will simply not be implemented as the law requires. “But he has good reason though…” one might say. Or “He has to, it’s not quite ready”. One could come up with any one of a dozen good reasons for the president to delay the employer mandate or the out-of-pockets caps. It is, after all, the single worst piece of legislation ever to be signed into law in the United States.
The problem however, is that the legislation does not give the President that option. The law doesn’t say the employer mandate, which requires all businesses with over 50 employees to provide health insurance to their staffs or face fines up to $3,000 per employee, can be implemented when the market is ready. It says they will begin in 2014. The law doesn’t say that the cost caps, which limit annual deductibles to $2,000 per individual and $4,000 per family, can go into place when the President is ready to implement them. It says they go into effect in 2014.