Republican members of the US House of Representatives have moved forward with their threat to sue President Barack Obama and his administration over the ragged rollout of the Affordable Care Act.
House Speaker John Boehner accused the president of exceeding his authority in delaying the employer mandate portion of the 2010 law without a vote of Congress. Boehner and Republicans also say the Obama administration is illegally making payments to insurance companies.
“Time after time, the president has chosen to ignore the will of the American people and rewrite federal law on his own,” Boehner said. “If this president can get away with making his own laws, future presidents will have the ability to as well.”
The lawsuit has been long threatened, and Obama himself dismissed the idea as a “political stunt.” After the president announced he would ease immigration restrictions on some undocumented immigrants, Republican leaders moved forward with the lawsuit.
The Obama administration responded this week, saying, “At a time when the American people want Washington focused on jobs and the economy, the House Republicans want to sue us.”
Republicans allege the US Constitution does not give the president power to “enact or amend laws without a vote of Congress,” and as such, Obama’s choice to delay the implementation of a requirement that larger employers provide health insurance to workers was illegal.
Similarly, Republicans claim the administration is using funds from a Treasury Department account to pay insurance companies as part of the law’s cost-sharing program, which authorizes the US to pay carriers roughly $178 billion through 2024 for subsidies meant to reduce the cost of the plans.
Boehner alleges Congress did not appropriate funds for this particular program.
“If this lawsuit were successful on this cost-sharing point, no low-income Americans would lose their healthcare because insurance companies would still be required to provide coverage,” Boehner stressed.
The lawsuit may go nowhere, however. John Thomas, a law professor at Quinnipiac University in North Haven, Conn., told Bloomberg Congress does not have legal standing “to file lawsuits like this one, which argues an abstract point of the law, the president’s constitutional authority to issue executive orders.”
