The House of Representatives will pass a resolution authorizing itself to sue President Obama, and will then file suit against the president over his delay of the implementation of the Affordable Care Act’s employer mandate, Speaker John Boehner announced Thursday afternoon. A statement from the speaker’s office explains:
In 2013, the president changed the health care law without a vote of Congress, effectively creating his own law by literally waiving the employer mandate and the penalties for failing to comply with it. That’s not the way our system of government was designed to work. No president should have the power to make laws on his or her own.
As I’ve said, this isn’t about Republicans versus Democrats; it’s about the Legislative Branch versus the Executive Branch, and above all protecting the Constitution. The Constitution states that the president must faithfully execute the laws, and spells out that only the Legislative Branch has the power to legislate. The current president believes he has the power to make his own laws – at times even boasting about it. He has said that if Congress won’t make the laws he wants, he’ll go ahead and make them himself, and in the case of the employer mandate in his health care law, that’s exactly what he did.
The resolution is here.
Last summer, President Obama announced that the employer mandate — the requirement that employers with over 50 workers must offer affordable insurance — would be delayed one year, when it had been scheduled to be implemented in 2014. Now it will apply to businesses with 100 or more employees starting in 2015, and to firms with more than 50 employees starting in 2016.