Obamacare Schadenfreude

I'm really late with this today; but I have a good excuse.  Now where did I put it?  Oh yeah, I went fishing this morning at first light. But rain or shine, fishing or not, Obamacare Schadenfreude keeps accumulating.

From the Department of "Why do we need it at all?"

Obamacare's individual mandate effectively delayed another month

In a classic Friday news dump, the Department for Health and Human Services has just effectively delayed the individual mandate inPresident Obama's health care law for another month, until May 1.

This shift is the latest in a dizzying set of changes that have been made to the enforcement of a policy that the administration defended all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Starting in 2014, individuals who did not purchase government approved insurance were supposed to be subject to a penalty of $95 or 1 percent of taxable income. Under the original sequence of events, individuals would have had until Feb. 15 to purchase insurance without being fined. Last October, HHS created a "hardship exemption" that pushed the deadline to March 31 to coincide with the end of the open enrollment period for individuals seeking insurance through the federal exchange.

But in late March, HHS effectively extended open enrollment by announcing that anybody who claimed to have tried to sign up for insurance prior to March 31 would still be allowed to do so after that date.

Now, in regulations announced Friday, HHS has created another "hardship exemption" that would allow individuals who obtained insurance as of May 1 to avoid the mandate penalties.

It's going to be difficult to find anyone the Obamacare "tax" applies to. And remember, it was bought by Chief Justice Roberts as a tax.

Additionally, HHS created three more "special enrollment" periods for individuals who still want to seek insurance through the federal health insurance exchange. Those include individuals eligible or enrolled in COBRA continuation coverage, individuals whose plans are up for renewal outside of the open enrollment period, and participants in AmeriCorps, VISTA and National Civilian Community Corps programs.

And, oh look, more favorable treatment for more government drones.

Speaking of the Obamacare "tax" George Will is still holding out some hope that the DC Court of Appeals (and then eventually the Supreme Court) will overturn the whole thing as a violation of the origination clause: Obamacare’s doom

If the president wants to witness a refutation of his assertion that the survival of the Affordable Care Act is assured, come Thursday he should stroll the 13 blocks from his office to the nation’s second-most important court, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. There he can hear an argument involving yet another constitutional provision that evidently has escaped his notice. It is the origination clause, which says: “All bills for raising reveornue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with amendments as on other bills.”

The ACA passed the Senate on a party-line vote, and without a Democratic vote to spare, after a series of unsavory transactions that purchased the assent of several shrewdly extortionate Democrats. What will be argued on Thursday is that what was voted on — the ACA — was indisputably a revenue measure and unquestionably did not originate in the House, which later passed the ACA on another party-line vote.
. . .
In June 2012, a Supreme Court majority accepted a, shall we say, creative reading of the ACA by Chief Justice John Roberts. The court held that the penalty, which the ACA repeatedly calls a penalty, is really just a tax on the activity — actually, the nonactivity — of not purchasing insurance. The individual mandate is not, the court held, a command but merely the definition of a condition that can be taxed. The tax is mild enough to be semi-voluntary; individuals are free to choose whether or not to commit the inactivity that triggers the tax.

The “exaction” — Roberts’s word — “looks,” he laconically said, “like a tax in many respects.” It is collected by the IRS, and the proceeds go to the Treasury for the general operations of the federal government, not to fund a particular program. This surely makes the ACA a revenue measure.

Did it, however, originate in the House? Of course not.

In October 2009, the House passed a bill that would have modified a tax credit for members of the armed forces and some other federal employees who were first-time home buyers — a bill that had nothing to do with health care. Two months later the Senate “amended” this bill by obliterating it. The Senate renamed it and completely erased its contents, replacing them with the ACA’s contents.

Case law establishes that for a Senate action to qualify as a genuine “amendment” to a House-passed revenue bill, it must be “germane to the subject matter of the [House] bill.” The Senate’s shell game — gutting and replacing the House bill — created the ACA from scratch. The ACA obviously flunks the germaneness test, without which the House’s constitutional power of originating revenue bills would be nullified.

Case law establishes that the origination clause does not apply to two kinds of bills. One creates “a particular governmental program and . . . raises revenue to support only that program.” The second creates taxes that are “analogous to fines” in that they are designed to enforce compliance with a statute passed under one of the Constitution’s enumerated powers of Congress other than the taxing power. The ACA’s tax, which the Supreme Court repeatedly said is not an enforcement penalty, and hence is not analogous to a fine, fits neither exception to the origination clause.

That's funny, because his eyeglasses don't look rosy from the front. If only we had a Supreme Court that actually reliably look at the laws and constitution, and not just to find what they wanted to see.  And yes, I'm looking at you in particular, Judge Sotomayor.

And, very appropriately, Preznit Obama made Kathleen Sebelius the butt of a joke last night at the White House Correspondents Circle Jerk Dinner:

Kathleen Sebelius is a walking joke, literally.

At the White House Correspondents Dinner, Obama exploits the woman for laughs acting as if his slide show is broken and then calling someone out to fix it. Sebelius is the sight-joke punchline.