The Wall Street Journal: on Health Care

Ted Cruz: Obama changed ObamaCare mandate deadline by a blog post

There is no example of lawlessness more egregious than the enforcement--or non-enforcement--of the president's signature policy, the Affordable Care Act. Mr. Obama has repeatedly declared that "it's the law of the land." Yet he has repeatedly violated ObamaCare's statutory text.

The law says that businesses with 50 or more full-time employees will face the employer mandate on Jan. 1, 2014. President Obama changed that, granting a one-year waiver to employers. How did he do so? Not by going to Congress to change the text of the law, but through a blog post by an assistant secretary at Treasury announcing the change.

Ted Cruz: Obama asked companies to disobey ObamaCare rules for a year

In other words, rather than go to Congress and try to provide relief to the millions who are hurting because of the "train wreck" of ObamaCare (as one Senate Democrat put it), the president instructed private companies to violate the law and said he would in effect give them a get-out-of-jail-free card--for one year, and one year only. Moreover, Obama simultaneously issued a veto threat if Congress passed legislation doing what he was then ordering.

In the more than two centuries of our nation's history, there is simply no precedent for the White House wantonly ignoring federal law and asking private companies to do the same.

Brett Kavanaugh:  2011: ObamaCare mandate is essentially a tax

An op-ed by JD Vance in the Wall Street Journal: "Judge Kavanaugh has come under fire in some quarters of the right for challenges against ObamaCare--in which he aimed to rule narrowly and fairly rather than politically. In one, he dissented from an opinion that upheld the individual mandate. He observed that the individual mandate 'is unprecedented in American history' and cast doubt on its validity under either the Commerce or Taxing clause. " [Wall Street Journal, 7/2/18]

JD Vance: Question validity of ObamaCare's individual mandate

An op-ed by JD Vance in the Wall Street Journal: "Judge Kavanaugh has come under fire in some quarters of the right for challenges against ObamaCare--in which he aimed to rule narrowly and fairly rather than politically. In one, he dissented from an opinion that upheld the individual mandate. He observed that the individual mandate 'is unprecedented in American history' and cast doubt on its validity under either the Commerce or Taxing clause. " [Wall Street Journal, 7/2/18]