Good job. They can't pass a bill so they'll just fuck people over instead.
That, my friends, is leadership.
That's
exactly what it is. Exact same thing he's rightly doing with the illegal DACA program. That's what you get when the prior President engaged in regulatory end-runs around Congress because it wouldn't pass laws he wanted it to pass. That's not the way our government is supposed to function under the Constitution. If Congress and the President don't agree on legislation, it is supposed to die, no matter how great the President believes it to be, or how badly he wants it. The President's powers don't magically expand just because he can't get what he wants. As a result, the bureaucratic band-aids Obama slapped on these problems because he couldn't get the legislation he wanted are getting stricken down.
I'd point out that this eventuality was pointing out at the time on both DACA and the ACA by a whole lot of people when Obama did it in the first place.
In this particular situation, a district court determined that those payments were illegal because there was no Congressional authorization for them. The geniuses that crafted that bill forget to address that.
Darn. Maybe Democrats shouldn't have rammed through a 2300+ page bill back in 2010 without giving their own members time to read it, because someone might have figured this out. But, because some Democrats in the House were balking at the bill, constituent feedback was generally negative, and leadership was afraid some of that very tenuous support would flip, they rammed through that bill the second it was drafted and they had the votes. Unknown flaws and all.
The President shouldn't continue indefinitely payments that his Justice Department -- backed by a court -- are telling him are illegal. So, we're in a situation where ObamaCare is going to crash and burn because of design flaws if a bill isn't passed authorizing not only those subsidies, but also
additional funds to try to stop the current death spiral. But Democrats don't have the votes to do that, nor Hillary to sign it even if they did.
So what we've really got going on is a game of chicken. Obamacare is failing because it has structural flaws. We need to either pass a new law keeping it intact by funneling more money to it, or pass a law moving in a different direction. As of right now, Democrats can't pass their version, and the GOP can't pass theirs. Why it should be the GOP giving in to the Democrats on this?
So, if Congress can't pass a bill right now, maybe a couple of recalcitrant GOP Senators will see things differently when a true collapse of the exchanges becomes a much more realistic prospect.
