Ulysses S. Grant believed that the best way to insure the repeal of a bad law was to vigorously enforce it. Barack Obama seems to believe that the best way to keep a bad law on the books is to delay the implementation of it. His decision to delay the implementation of the employer mandate sections of the Affordable Care Act make sense only if you accept the premise that the law is so flawed that it would be disastrous to put it into effect, and therefore it needs to be amended or repealed.
Congress has for a long time been ignoring James Madison’s sage advice that no law be passed that is so long it cannot be read or so complex it cannot be understood. But the Affordable Care Act set a new standard for lengthy incoherent complexity. Nancy Pelosi may have thought she was being cute when she remarked that the law needed to be passed so we could know what was in it, but she was spot-on.
As a former constitutional law professor, President Obama is well aware that when the writers of the Constitution vested the executive power in the presidency, they did not intend to establish an office that would wield absolute power. Far from it, the presidency is designed to be a weak office, and while presidential power has increased considerably in modern times, the president is not supposed to be an absolute dictator. He is charged by law to carry out the legislative dictates of the Congress.
For Barack Obama this is quite a conundrum. He has on many occasions said that he rather likes having the Affordable Care Act referred to as Obama Care. So surely he would not want to see the signature piece of legislation that crowns his otherwise lackluster presidency stillborn. Yet if he pushes forward with the implementation of the Affordable Care Act, the resulting economic impact would be so severe that the US economy could slide back into a recession. By implementing the Act, he would risk a political backlash that could result in an even more disastrous defeat for the Democrats in 2014 than they suffered in the 2010 mid-term elections.
For now his pragmatism has won over his idealism, and he has decided to delay the implementation of the employer mandate requirements of the Affordable Care Act. Republicans in the House may bluster that he doesn’t have the right to delay implementation, but that will not stop Obama from ignoring Congress. He has after all done that successfully on a number of occasions, most notably with respect to failing to enforce current immigration statutes.
What must be hard for Obama, however, is the realization that the carefully scripted sales pitch for Obama Care has not only failed to sell, but that even he now has to admit that the end result of all his exhortations about insuring those who had no coverage and doing it for a lower cost without needing to change doctors or have less care, etc., etc., etc., were nothing more than a combination of little lies that added up to one very large untruth.
The proposition that Obama Care would benefit Americans by improving the quality and affordability of their health care was demonstrably false from the moment the Act began to take shape. To give the president the benefit of the doubt, he may have initially even believed some of the lies that he told to get Obama Care enacted. But then, the most damaging lies are the ones told by the people who believe them.
The president should be thinking about Sir Walter Scott’s line from his epic poem, Marmion, “Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive.”
Al Kaltman is a political science professor who teaches a leadership studies course at George Washington University. He is the author of Cigars, Whiskey and Winning: Leadership Lessons from General Ulysses S. Grant.
