AFP/DPA
US House Republicans filed a lawsuit against President Barack Obama’s administration over his signature healthcare law and unilateral actions they say amount to an abuse of executive authority.
The suit, which Republicans have threatened for months, was filed in US District Court in Washington against the secretaries of the Treasury and the Health and Human Services Department and focuses on the administration’s “unconstitutional and unlawful” rewriting of segments of the law commonly referred to as Obamacare.
The legal action addresses president’s unilateral move last year to defer the Affordable Care Act’s employer mandate, which requires that employers with 50 or more workers offer health coverage to their full-time staff or pay fines, until 2015.
It also challenges what Republicans described as illegally transferring about $175bn to insurance companies under Obamacare over the next 10 years.
Congress has not appropriated funds for the programme.
While the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office reported that the administration will repay the cost-sharing subsidies, the lawsuit charges that the administration is unconstitutionally using funds from a separate Treasury account to pay the insurance companies.
“Time after time, the president has chosen to ignore the will of the American people and re-write federal law on his own without a vote of Congress,” House Speaker John Boehner said in announcing the lawsuit. “The House has an obligation to stand up for the Constitution, and that is exactly why we are pursuing this course of action.”
Republicans framed the lawsuit as a broader challenge to what they see is systematic executive overreach by the president.
“What we’re dealing with here is bigger than Obamacare, bigger than an executive action,” House Republican Mario Diaz-Balart told CNN. “It’s whether the president of the United States has the power to do whatever he or she wants to do regardless of whether the law allows him or her to do that.”
Top House Democrat Nancy Pelosi dismissed the “meritless lawsuit” and said that it marks Republican leadership bowing to “impeachment-hungry extremists”.
The suit is the latest attempt by the Republican-controlled House to undermine the Affordable Care Act.
The House has voted dozens of times to repeal the law, but the Democratic-controlled Senate has blocked the repeal efforts.
The lawyer representing the case, Jonathan Turley, said in a blog that the complaint focuses on the administration’s “usurpation” of the House’s legislative and budget authority
Following elections earlier this month, Republicans will also hold a majority in the US Senate beginning in January, opening a new path to legislative repudiation of Obama’s signature legislative achievement.
The New York Times reported that Speaker of the House John Boehner had trouble finding a lawyer to represent the case after two lawyers withdrew.
Turley is a George Washington University professor and a well-known legal commentator in the media.
“After scouring Washington for months, Republicans have finally found a TV lawyer to file their meritless lawsuit,” Pelosi said in a statement yesterday.
“The legislative branch cannot sue simply because they disagree with the way a law passed by a different Congress has been implemented,” she said.
Boehner has charged that Obama tries to “make his own laws” and is violating the constitutional separation of powers.
He also cites Obama’s use of executive action to accomplish things that they have blocked – the immigration relief programme Obama announced late on Thursday, for example, as well as actions to cut carbon emissions from coal plants.
Democrats have charged that Republicans are choosing lawsuits over legislating such issues.
The conservative party has refused to bring an immigration reform measure – already approved by the Senate – to a vote.
Informed of House efforts to file a lawsuit against him before the July vote, Obama quipped: “So sue me.”
