Critics: Employer Mandate Delay an Abuse of Power
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The White House has postponed the portion of the Affordable Care Act mandating medium-sized businesses provide health coverage to workers.
The Obamacare regulation will now become effective in January 2016 for companies with 50 to 99 employees. But it will still begin in 2015 for employers with 100 or more on staff.
The move has critics questioning whether such changes are legal.
"This is stuff you do in a banana republic," Fox News contributor Charles Krauthammer said. "It's as if the law is a blackboard on which Obama writes any number he wants."
The perception that President Barack Obama is acting more like a king than a president was not helped by a comment he made Monday while touring Monticello with French President Hollande.
"The good thing as president, I can do whatever I want," Obama joked.
The remark comes after a State of the Union address in which the president threatened to act unilaterally, without the approval of Congress.
"It's troubling because it's a violation of the spirit of the Constitution, if not a violation of the Constitution itself," Rep. Morgan Griffith, R-Va., said. "And it's inappropriate for the leader of the greatest nation on earth to say, 'I'm gonna act on my own whether you like it or not.'"
Jay Sekulow, chief counsel of the American Center for Law and Justice, shared the Virginia lawmaker's sentiments.
"So here's the question," Sekulow said. "Presidential power: Has the executive branch gone too far? Yes!"
From the IRS's targeting of conservative groups, to the NSA surveillance scandal, to threats to impose gun control by executive order, critics say Obama looks more like a monarch than a president.
"I'm against having a king," Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., said. "I think having a monarch is what we fought the American Revolution over and someone who wants to bypass the Constitution, bypass Congress -- that's someone who wants to act like a king or a monarch."
But with Obamacare seeming to unravel more by the day, it could take more than a king to save it.
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