Month: July 2014

House has decided to sue Executive Office

House has decided to sue Executive Office

supreme court photoI, for one, am glad that the House has decided to sue the President of the United States.

Congress has the exclusive authority to make law because lawmaking requires pluralism, debate and compromise, the essence of representative government. If Congress cannot achieve consensus, that doesn’t mean Congress is “broken.” A divided Congress reflects a divided people. Until there is a compromise acceptable to the majority, the status quo is the only correct path. An impasse emphatically does not warrant a president’s bypassing Congress with a pen and phone, as Mr. Obama claimed the power to do early this year.

The separation of powers also guarantees political accountability. When Congress makes a law and the president executes it as written, citizens will know whom to reward or punish at the next election.government branches photo

A president who unilaterally rewrites a bad or unworkable law, however, prevents the American people from knowing whether Congress should be praised or condemned for passing it. Such unconstitutional actions can be used to avert electoral pain for the president and his allies.

If Mr. Obama can get away with this, his successors will be tempted to follow suit. A Republican president, for example, might unilaterally get the Internal Revenue Service to waive collection of the capital-gains tax (something that I am personally in favor of but I know my more liberal friends would protest). Congress will be bypassed, rendering it increasingly irrelevant, and disfranchising the American people.

I am not going tgovernment branches photoo predict the winner of this suit here even though I have done it elsewhere more privately. The key learning from our government regardless of who wins this little battle is that no branch of the government has the right to completely ignore the other branches nor ignore a large minority or a small majority of the people.

Photo by Stephen D. Melkisethian

Photo by futureatlas.com

Photo by dbking

Gruber discusses penalize States at Noblis – January 18, 2012

Gruber discusses penalize States at Noblis – January 18, 2012

Obamacare was originally written to penalize states that did not establish a health exchange.

In case you didn’t believe that the Obama administration has no problem changing the law without approval from Congress, I point you to this interview. In it Gruber plainly explains that for States that do NOT set up an exchange they will NOT get a subsidy – the law was intended to penalize states that were not on board with the program. This is exactly opposite of what the Obama administration put into place AND opposite of what the government argued to the 2 federal courts.

A change to the law such as paying subsidies to federal exchange enrollees has to be created as a bill within Congress and then signed by the President. That is what the Constitution says. We need to stop allowing the Administration take liberties with the Constitution to appease their political goals. For those that cry out, “Impeach Obama!”, I want to assure you that this is not an impeachable offense.

Questioner: You mentioned the health-information Exchanges for the states, and it is my understanding that if states don’t provide them, then the federal government will provide them for the states.

Gruber: Yeah, so these health-insurance Exchanges, you can go on ma.healthconnector.org and see ours in Massachusetts, will be these new shopping places and they’ll be the place that people go to get their subsidies for health insurance. In the law, it says if the states don’t provide them, the federal backstop will. The federal government has been sort of slow in putting out its backstop, I think partly because they want to sort of squeeze the states to do it. I think what’s important to remember politically about this, is if you’re a state and you don’t set up an Exchange, that means your citizens don’t get their tax credits. But your citizens still pay the taxes that support this bill. So you’re essentially saying to your citizens, you’re going to pay all the taxes to help all the other states in the country. I hope that’s a blatant enough political reality that states will get their act together and realize there are billions of dollars at stake here in setting up these Exchanges, and that they’ll do it. But you know, once again, the politics can get ugly around this.

Long video – skip ahead to 31 minutes. http://youtu.be/GtnEmPXEpr0?t=31m25s

“Look Up” from your phone – there is a world out there

“Look Up” from your phone – there is a world out there

Great video. I hope all of my friends watch it. Or better yet, don’t watch it and have a real conversation (non-texting) with someone you love.

‘Look Up’ is a lesson taught to us through a love story, in a world where we continue to find ways to make it easier for us to connect with one another, but always results in us spending more time alone.

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