Pretty much the question. I know that his administration postponed this, but how is this a legal action for the executive branch to take? What allows them to pick and choose pieces of the law to uphold at any given date?
They didn’t postpone the mandate. They postponed the reporting requirement. Those reports must be submitted “at such time as the Secretary may prescribe.”
That’s not to say there aren’t genuine legal concerns about whether that “such time” was supposed to happen somewhere in 2014, as the rest of the law suggests. But I think that’s basically the answer to your question.
It seems to be a heckuvalot more than just suspending the filing of some paperwork that you are suggesting.
Delaying the reporting requirement entails delaying the enforcement of the mandate (since it is unenforceable without the reporting).
Don’t conflate formal reporting requirements with “just some paperwork.” The reporting requirements are the whole issue here. Here’s the announcement.
The administration (any jurisdiction) can announce that it will decline to prosecute or penalize someone according to some valid law.
The only people who can sue over this are people who are adversely affected - “standing to sue”. I.e. if the government says it won’t enforce trespassing law, I can sue over the people walking all over my land and wrecking my garden if the goevrnment refuses to send police to deal with them.
An employer might decide not to offer health care, and opt to pay the penalty instead. If the government then decides not to collect that penalty, I don’t know if the employee could sue - after all, they employer my have done the sme even if they did have to pay a penalty. So you can’t really show that the government’s action caused the lack of benefit.
The employer comes out ahead - he’s not going to sue even if he wanted to, after all coming out financially better is not a negative effect.
The congress might be able to impeach, on the grounds that the decision hurts the nation… but it’s debatable if that is really a high crime or misdemeanor and in any case, you wouldn’t get 2/3 of the senate to agree it was.
Similarly, if the government declined to enforce the penalty on individuals who failed to buy coverage, nobody would be in a position to sue - unless the insurance companies say “we aren’t getting as many healthy people signing up so all you sicko’s, the premiums are going through the roof.” then one of the sickos might sue over their elevated premium, there’s a more obvious cause-and-effect.
If the federalgovernment decided not to set up an exchange (in a state with no state exchange), even though the legislation says to do so, then maybe someone looking for a cheap plan on the exchange would have standing to sue.
So I assume a lot of law is difficult to ignore without consequences, but the employer mandate obviously was one they could ignore.
I wouldn’t know how to conflate if I tried…
Thanks for acknowledging and pointing out the real effect of delaying the reporting requirements, though!
Sure. Let’s be clear that the reporting, however, and not the mandate, was genuinely the cause for concern among the people who lobbied for this. And the Treasury Department decision has all kinds of other effects too that are outside the scope of this thread.
But what the OP asked about was how they were able to do this legally. And the answer is that they didn’t directly postpone the mandate. The delay in enforcement is the necessary consequence of the thing they did postpone, which it was within their power to postpone.
I get that this sounds like a technicality, but the OP asked a legal question and AFAIK that’s the technical answer. I suppose we could debate whether their legal position is a good one or not, but then I think we drift out of GQ.
I follow you…but I think the biggest employers who have the wherewithall to lobby were going to fully comply anyway. It was just a PITA to them…they weren’t the ones facing any penalties.
I think that the real reason that the Admin delayed it was the bad press they were getting re smaller employers who had incentives to work around the system. Am I wrong that they now have more time to make those moves that cause the bad press… i.e. cutting hours?