Defunding: The Framers’ Remedy for Presidential Lawlessness

By Betsy McCaughey

Obama’s unconstitutional actions have forced Congress’s hand.

Two weeks ago, the House of Representatives Appropriations Committee voted to strip the scandal ridden Internal Revenue Service of nearly one quarter of its 2014 budget as punishment for its targeting of political groups and its costly boondoggles. Shockingly, Senate Democrats voted to increase the IRS’s budget.

Last week, numerous Republicans in both houses of Congress threatened to cut off all funding for the federal government as of October 1, in response to President Obama’s unconstitutional stance that he can pick and choose which parts of Obamacare he will implement.

On July 3, the Obama administration disclosed that it would not implement Obamacare’s employer mandate on January 1, 2014, though the law says the mandate “shall” go into effect that day. The administration pretended it was no big deal. But it violates the law and affects 10 million currently uninsured or underinsured workers whose employers would have been subject to the mandate. The cost of insuring these workers is shifted from employers to taxpayers, who foot the bill for subsidized insurance on the new Obamacare exchanges. At an average cost of $5,290 per subsidized enrollee, according to the Congressional Budget Office, this will add billions to the cost of Obamacare next year alone.

Two days later, another whopper. On July 5, the Obama administration revealed that it would also skip the health law’s requirement that applicants seeking taxpayer subsidies to pay for their insurance have their income and insurance eligibility verified. Welcome fraudsters, too bad again for taxpayers.

President Obama does not have the authority to choose which parts of the law are enforced. In 1975, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously against President Richard Nixon’s inflated claims that he could selectively carry out the law. But going to court to keep presidents in line is slow and necessitates finding litigants to sue the president. The framers gave Congress a more practical way to resist a power-hungry president: defunding. Defunding is precisely what members of Congress are supposed to do when a president breaks the law. It’s checks and balances in action. Two centuries ago, the chief architect of the U.S. Constitution James Madison declared in Federalist No. 58 that Congress’s authority over spending is the “most complete and effectual tool” to stop a president from grabbing more power than the Constitution allows.

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