When, on July 2, the Obama Administration announced a one-year postponement of the January 1, 2014 effective date for the Affordable Care Act's requirement that large employers provide their workers health insurance or pay a tax, affected businesses "cheered." But anti-"Obamacare" advocates and politicians howled. They saw a "blatantly illegal move" (Brietbart.com pundit Ken Klukowski), a government acting "as though it were not bound by law" (CATO Institute economist Michael Cannon), and an unconstitutional "refus[al] to enforce" a democratically enacted law (Congressional Joint Resolution #45, introduced July 10 by New Jersey House Republican Scott Garrett). In the Wall Street Journal, Stanford Professor Michael McConnell, formerly a George W. Bush appointee to the federal bench, huffed that the decision "raises grave concerns about [President Obama's] understanding" that, unlike medieval British monarchs, American presidents have, under Article II, Section 3 of our Constitution, a "duty, not a discretionary power" to "take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed." Following up in the Journal this Monday, David Rivkin and Lee Casey, who helped lawyer last year's legal challenge to the ACA individual mandate, darkly intimated that the new employer mandate delay could trigger litigation that could result in "the whole statute fall[ing] while the president's suspension is in effect."
So has President Obama, in fact, broken the law and abused his constitutional authority by delaying the Affordable Care Act's "employer mandate"? This may be the top Republican talking point right now. But what does the law actually say about this?
Mostly, the heated rhetoric of the past few weeks ignores what the Administration has actually decided and how it has delimited the scope and purpose of that decision. The Treasury Department's announcement provides for one year of "transition relief," to continue working through 2014 with "employers, insurers, and other reporting entities" to revise and engage in "real-world testing" of the reporting requirements, simplify forms, coordinate requisite public and private sector information technology arrangements, and engineer a "smoother transition to full implementation in 2015." The announcement describes the postponed requirements as "ACA mandatory" -- i.e., not discretionary or subject to indefinite waiver. On July 9, Assistant Treasury Secretary Mark Mazur added, in a letter to House Energy and Commerce Committee Chair Fred Upton, that the Department expects to publish proposed rules implementing the relevant provisions "this summer, after a dialogue with stakeholders." In effect, the Administration explains the delay as a sensible adjustment to phase-in enforcement, not a refusal to enforce