After the immigration speech Barack Obama delivered on November 20, John Boehner today filed the House lawsuit against Treasury and Health and Human Services.
The full 38 page complaint is listed here.
The points of the lawsuit are:
THE BASICS OF THE HOUSE LITIGATION
- The president’s unilateral actions on the health care law’s employer mandate in 2013 and 2014 will likely be the focus of the litigation brought by the House. There are many examples of executive overreach by the president, but his actions on the health care law are arguably the ones that give the House the best chance of success in the courts.
- The litigation will focus solely on the president’s unilateral changes to the health care law because that’s how the suit must be structured in order to maximize the House’s chances of being granted standing by the court. Basing the litigation on a laundry list of grievances against the president would make standing more difficult.
- In the case of the health care law’s employer mandate, the president twice changed the law without going through Congress, effectively creating his own law by literally waiving the mandate and the penalties for failing to comply with it. He legislated without the Legislative Branch. The Constitution doesn’t give presidents the power to do that. No president should have such authority. That’s what the House litigation will argue.
Republicans call Obama executive actions ‘damaging to presidency,’ file lawsuit over Obamacare
By Paul Kane
House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) launched a double-barreled response to President Obama’s recent executive actions on Friday, announcing a House lawsuit over unilateral changes to Obamacare and vowing to counter Obama’s move to protect millions of illegal immigrants from deportation with additional legislative action.
He warned that the executive action on immigration was “damaging the presidency” and that Congress will not let it stand without a fight.
“Time after time, the president has chosen to ignore the will of the American people and rewrite federal law on his own without a vote of Congress. That’s not the way our system of government was designed to work,” Boehner said.
The lawsuit, filed Friday against the Health and Human Services (HHS) and Treasury secretaries, challenges two of Obama’s executive actions: that his administration “unlawfully waived the employer mandate” and illegally transferred funds to insurance companies.
Obama’s executive actions twice delaying the employer mandate “directly contradict the clear and plain language of the health care law,” Boehner said in a statement.
Boehner also said that, according to the Congressional Budget Office, the administration will pay $3 billion to insurance companies this fiscal year, and will make payments of $175 billion over the next 10 years under an HHS-based cost-sharing program, even though Congress has never appropriated funds for the program.
Boehner declined to spell out how Republicans would counter the immigration executive actions, which extend protections to roughly 4 million undocumented parents of legal U.S. citizens and young immigrants brought here illegally when they were children.
“We’re working with our members and looking at the options available to us, but I will say to you the House will, in fact, act,” Boehner told reporters Friday morning, in the first televised Republican rebuttal to Obama’s prime-time address Thursday night.
He dodged a question about the assertion by one of his own leadership team members, House Appropriations Chairman Hal Rogers (R-Ky.), that there was little Congress could do to restrict funding for the new program. Rogers and his staff said Thursday that funding for the implementation of the new policy does not come from the annual spending bills approved by Congress but instead comes from border fees, placing it outside the reach of congressional Republicans.
Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), the leading opponent of the president’s action, told reporters Thursday that he would support attaching a policy rider onto the government funding bills that simply forbid the federal workforce from implementing the new rules on immigration. Sessions is leading the effort to keep government funding to a short leash into the new year, when Republicans take over the Senate and control both chambers of Congress, making it easier to get clear majorities for his preferred line of attack.
Such a move would require a 60-vote super-majority in the Senate, and it would almost certainly draw a veto from Obama, which, critics say, would lead to a possible shutdown of some federal agencies.
Boehner deflected those questions and instead blamed Obama for issuing too many executive orders to modify the controversial new health law that took effect over the last year, which left his rank-and-file Republicans unwilling to trust the president and refusing to even consider a broad rewrite of immigration laws.
“He created an environment where the members could not trust him, and trying to find a way to work together was virtually impossible, and I had warned the president over and over that his actions were making it impossible for me to do what he wanted me to do,” the speaker said, explaining his inability to even consider smaller pieces of the 2013 Senate-approved legislation that revamped border and immigration laws.
“We have a broken immigration system, and the American people expect us to work together to fix it, and we ought to do it through the democratic process,” he said.
In his prime-time speech from the East Room of the White House, Obama blamed Republicans for forcing his hand by refusing to approve immigration reform and told them, “Pass a bill.”
Conservatives inside and outside Congress want to use the budget process as a battleground to wage war against Obama and his immigration program. The proposed gambit raises the specter of another government shutdown, akin to the one that damaged Republicans last year.
In a floor speech Thursday, soon-to-be Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) suggested that his preference would be for Republicans to avoid becoming mired in a fiscal clash during the lame-duck session, shortly before the GOP takes control of the Senate in January.
Many conservative lawmakers are shrugging off those pleas, however. Furious with the president, they are planning a series of immediate and hard-line actions that could have sweeping consequences. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Tex.) said Wednesday that Obama’s executive action should be met with a refusal to vote on any more of his nominees, and on Thursday, he compared the action with the ancient Catiline conspiracy, a plot to overthrow the Roman Republic.
Sessions (R-Ala.), likely the next chairman of the budget committee, has advocated for a series of stopgap spending bills with the intent of pressuring the president to relent. Sessions is the featured speaker at a Heritage Foundation event Friday morning in response to Obama’s moves.
And Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) — one of the loudest voices on the right — has hinted at bringing up impeachment measures. “We have constitutional authority to do a string of things. [Impeachment] would be the very last option, but I would not rule it out,” King said Thursday on CNN.
Robert A. Costa contributed to this report.
