Lawsuit Launched Against Obamacare For Exempting Congress

How do you add insult to injury to millions of people losing their insurance or having their premiums quadruple?Exempting the lawmakers from the same law causingthose injuries.

When a government doesn’t have to follow the same destructive laws it forces on its citizens, that’s called tyranny — and it must be fought.

Senator Ron Johnson of Wisconsin is a leader of that fight. He filed a lawsuit against the federal government yesterday “to make Congress live by the letter of thehealthcare law it imposed on the rest of America.”  Johnson wrote an op-ed for the Wall Street Journal explaining his intentions and reasoning behind the lawsuit:

On Monday, Jan. 6, I am filing suit in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Wisconsin to make Congress live by the letter of the health-care law it imposed on the rest of America. By arranging for me and other members of Congress and their staffs to receive benefits intentionally ruled out by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, the administration has exceeded its legal authority.

The president and his congressional supporters have also broken their promise to the American people that ObamaCare was going to be so good that they would participate in it just like everyone else. In truth, many members of Congress feel entitled to an exemption from the harsh realities of the law they helped jam down Americans’ throats in 2010. Unlike millions of their countrymen who have lost coverage and must now purchase insurancethrough an exchange, members and their staffs will receive an employer contribution to help pay for their new plans.

The American people were outraged. Rand Paul introduced an amendment to the Constitution to ban Congress from exempting itself themselves from their own laws.

So, in an effort to mitigate the anger, they made it to where the onlyhealth insurance plans members of Congress and their staff could receive were “created under Obamacare or offered through an exchange established underObamacare.” They soon realized, however, they bit off more than they could chew.Obamacare is awful — and Congress knows it. This is why they “went running to President Obama for relief,” according to Johnson. He writes:

They wanted to appear eager to avail themselves of the law’s benefits and be more than willing to subject themselves to the exact same rules, regulations and requirements as their constituents.

Eager, that is, until they began to understand what they had actually done to themselves. For instance, by agreeing to go through an exchange they cut themselves off from the option of paying for health care with pretax dollars, the way many Americans will continue to do through employer-supplied plans. That’s when they went running to President Obama for relief. The president supplied it via the Office of Personnel Management (OPM), which issued a convoluted ruling in October 2013 that ignores the clear intent and language of the law. After groping for a pretext, OPM essentially declared the federal government a small employer—magically qualifying members of Congress for coverage through a Small Business Health Options Program, exchanges where employers can buy insurance for their employees.

Neat trick, huh? Except that in issuing the ruling, OPM exceeded its statutory jurisdiction and legal authority. In directing OPM to do so,President Obama once again chose political expediency instead of faithfully executing the law—even one of his own making. If the president wants to change the law, he needs to come to Congress to have them change it with legislation, not by presidential fiat or decree.

So not only does Congress get their exemptions from the law back, President Obama once again bypassed Congress to change the law as he saw fit. This is completely unacceptable. Johnson says that not only does he have “legal standing but an obligation to go to court to overturn this unlawful executive overreach, end the injustice, and provide a long overdue check on an executive that recognizes fewer and fewer constitutional restraints.”

The fight for liberty isn’t an easy one. When your own government turns against you, getting them to repeal the law they don’t even have to abide by seems nearly impossible. Events like this can make the atmosphere feel bleak, but the silver lining is that every day more and more people stand up and enter the fight against a tyrannical government — from dedicated grassroots activists to principled representatives.

If you agree Congress should (at the very least) follow the same laws they force onto us, help us spread the word about Johnson’s lawsuit by sharing this article.

http://www.capitalisminstitute.org/obamacare-congressional-exemption-lawsuit/