Hear Tom Rice

House Members Suing Obama for Illegal Actions Concerning Obamacare Changes

Posted By Dave Jolly

I’ve been saying all along that since the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act was an act of Congress that President Barack Obama has no legal authority to make all of the changes he’s made to the healthcare bill now known as Obamacare.  His latest change, a one year extension of the individual mandate for the millions who had their health plans cancelled, is the 14^th illegal change made by the president.  Finally, a group of US Representatives have had their fill of Obama’s dictatorial ways and are taking action to force him to abide by the US Constitution.  Rep. Tom Rice (R-SC) has sponsored a bill known as the Stop This Overreaching Presidency (STOP) Act. 

Speaking to WND, Rice, a freshman congressman said:  “Article II, Section 3, requires the president to faithfully execute the laws of the United States. Everybody’s bound by the law, right up to the president. He is not exempt… If a president is allowed to pick and choose which laws he wishes to enforce, it creates tremendous opportunities for wrongdoing.”

“What would we say if the next president who came in decided he didn’t like Obamacare and he wasn’t going to enforce any part of it? What would we say if a president decided he wasn’t going to enforce the maximum bracket on the income tax, or wasn’t going to enforce the income tax on his political friends? Of course, those things wouldn’t be tolerated.  We’ve got a similar type of lines going on here with Obamacare. We’ve got the president giving 1,300 exemptions. We’ve got him waiving the employer mandate for businesses but applying the individual mandate for the common conservative. It’s not right. The law has got to be applied uniformly.”

“I started working on this last July.  Right after the extension of the employer mandate was in the press, one of the Democratic senators said, ‘How can the president do this?’ That’s what spurred me to look at what we could do to force the president to enforce the law.”  The changes to Obamacare are not the only things that Rice is focusing on as he continued:  “In the resolution, we list four specific things. One is the waiver of the work requirements under the welfare law. One is the granting of legal work status to illegal immigrants en masse. One is the waiver of the employer mandate under the Affordable Care Act. The fourth is the extension for one year of the ability of the insurance companies to sell ‘substandard insurance policies.’ In this case, substandard means any insurance policy that people actually want to buy.”

I think they need to add Obama’s order to Attorney General Eric Holder to stop enforcing the Defense of Marriage Act over a year before the Supreme Court struck it down.  In addition to the giving legal work status to illegal aliens, Obama also ordered the Department of Homeland Security to stop deporting thousands of illegals who had not committed a felony.

You may wonder about whether Rice has any support for the STOP Act, but he says he has received encouragement from other House members including House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VI).  So far, Rice says there are 34 co-sponsors of the bill, including three members of the House Judiciary Committee.  Rice explained:  “I have spoken to Cantor about it, and he seems interested in it. I think the chances of it hitting the floor are pretty good.”

Rice told WND that this has nothing to do with party politics but is a matter of upholding the Constitution and the laws of the land.  Rice stated:  “This is not a tea-party thing.  This is not a Democrat versus Republican thing. This is not any personal animosity toward the president. What the president is doing undermines our constitutional protections, the separation of powers. Congress makes the laws. The president enforces the laws, and he’s refusing to do that. He’s not carrying out his constitutional duty and I simply want him to do what he’s required to do by the Constitution.”

Listen to Rice’s interview on WND Radio:  It’s nice to see someone finally taking action against Obama’s illegal ways, however, I think this needs to be taken directly to the courts.  The House may pass Rice’s resolution, but we know that the Democratic controlled Senate will do nothing to hold Obama accountable.  We’ll have to see what happens and pray for a miracle that Congress will finally hold Obama accountable for his illegal actions.