Just in case you have slipped back into your old habit of thinking we are a nation of laws rather than men, the Office of Personnel Management (which oversees health insurance for the federal work force) has issued a reminder that such quaint illusions should be abandoned.
As has been widely reported, the Congressional Research Service (operating on the novel theory that someone should actually read the bill) recently discovered that Obamacare required members of Congress and their personal staff to give up their coverage before alternate health plans become available:
Under well-established canons of statutory interpretation, the [OMB] report said, ‘a law takes effect on the date of its enactment’ unless Congress clearly specifies otherwise. And Congress did not specify any other effective date for this part of the health care law. The law was enacted when President Obama signed it.
But the apparatchiks at the Office of Personnel Management have no intention of allowing “well established canons of statutory interpretation” to interfere with their policies. They have issued letters to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid that essentially say pay no attention to the law behind the curtain:
Management has concluded that Section 1312(d)(3)(D) of the Affordable Care Act, Public Law No. 111-148, is not effective until the state exchanges referenced in section 1312(d)(3)(D)become operational … Members and their staffs are eligible to continue to participate fully in the FEHBP.
The Commissars don’t say how they ”concluded” that the law doesn’t say what it says or why it didn’t become effective when Obama signed it. The OPM (an appropriate acronym if ever there was one) simply decided to ignore the language of the bill. In other words, the law is what the apparatchiks say it is.
The same dynamic occurred last month, when insurers discovered that the language of Obamacare doesn’t actually require them to sell insurance to children with pre-exiting conditions. When that came out, the Secretary of HHS informed the insurers that the law says what SHE says it says.
So, forget all that nonsense about the law of the land being determined by Congress and the President (i.e. people you can theoretically vote out of office). When the laws passed by your “representatives” become inconvenient, your real masters in the federal bureaucracy will simply ignore them.
Welcome to the brave new world of bureaucratic statism.
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