"But we have to pass the bill so you can find out what is in it, away from the fog of the controversy."
Nancy Pelosi
The Magazine
It is not often that a president announces his
decision not to enforce a law as written, the House of Representatives
responds by offering to restore the rule of law by amending that law to
permit the delay the president wishes . . . and then the president
threatens to veto that legislation if it gets to his desk. But such is
the pathbreaking and jaw-dropping spectacle of Obamacare.
Newscom
On
January 21, 2009, President Obama said, “Transparency and the rule of
law will be the touchstones of this presidency.” In the late afternoon
of July 2, 2013, the Obama administration announced, in a blog post,
that it had decided not to enforce the employer mandate—Obamacare’s
requirement that businesses with 50 or more employees provide federally
approved health insurance—during the first year that the law calls for
that provision to go into effect. In issuing its lawless delay, the
administration all but admitted that, despite having had more than three
years and three months since Obamacare’s passage to prepare to enforce
the legislation, it had failed to get the job done on time. House
Republicans responded by holding votes on delaying the employer mandate
as a matter of law, rather than of executive fiat, and also on delaying
the despised individual mandate—long the least-popular part of
Obamacare.
Both pieces of legislation passed the House by large
margins—the employer-mandate delay by 264 to 161, with 35 Democrats
joining all but 1 Republican; the individual-mandate delay by 251 to
174, with 22 Democrats joining all but 1 Republican.
