King Barack does what he wants, and no one on the Left gives a damn:
ObamaCare for thee, little peons, but not for the majestic aristocracy of Congress and their loyal courtiers! His Majesty King Barack I has once again sniffed disdainfully at that dust-covered old scrap of parchment we call “The Constitution,” dispensed with its antiquated “separation of powers” claptrap, and issued a royal decree that Congress shall be immune from the health-care boondoggle that’s killing the American job market.
The Wall Street Journal brings us the joyous news:
The Affordable Care Act requires Members of Congress and their staffs to participate in its insurance exchanges, in order to gain first-hand experience with what they’re about to impose on their constituents. Harry Truman enrolled as the first Medicare beneficiary in 1965, and why shouldn’t the Members live under the same laws they pass for the rest of the country?
That was the idea when Iowa Senator Chuck Grassley proposed the original good-enough-for-thee, good-enough-for-me amendment in 2009, and the Finance Committee unanimously adopted his rule. Declared Chairman Max Baucus, “I’m very gratified that you have so much confidence in our program that you’re going to be able to purchase the new program yourself and I’m confident too that the system will work very well.”
Harry Reid revised the Grassley amendment when he rammed through his infamous ObamaCare bill that no one had read for a vote on Christmas eve. But he neglected to include language about what would happen to the premium contributions that the government makes for its employees. Whether it was intentional or not, the fairest reading of the statute as written is that if Democrats thought somebody earning $174,000 didn’t deserve an exchange subsidy, then this person doesn’t get a subsidy merely because he happens to work in Congress.
But all of that is old news, because His Majesty has once again asserted powers absolutely unknown to the Constitution, and rewritten a duly ratified body of law to create a very special carve-out for those very special six-figure employees of Congress. There’s not a single phrase in the Affordable Care Act that gives the President executive power to lift the ObamaCare requirements from the ruling class, any more than he has the power to unilaterally revise the date when the employer mandate goes into effect on the lowly serfs in the private sector.
Read the whole thing.
