Obama, the Constitutional Violator-in-Chief

Here Cato Institute’s Ilya Shapiro gives you a neat top 10 list of Barack Obama’s more egregious constitutional violations. Did the President not swear on the bible to defend the Constitution? How does this man have a job? Why has his resignation not been demanded?

After watching snippets of the hearing and reading the written testimony, I thought maybe I should start my “top 10 constitutional violations” update with the Affordable Care Act alone. But it seems that I’m not the only one thinking along these lines. Hot off the presses, at 10am today, the office of Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) released its second report on “The Obama Administration’s Attempts to Expand Federal Power” – the first was on the Supreme Court’s unanimous rejection of the Justice Department’s more outlandish positions, a trend I’ve written about as well – titled “The Administration’s Lawless Acts on Obamacare and Continued Court Challenges to Obamacare.”

Here are the seven items the new Cruz report highlights:

Category One: Implementation Contrary to Statutory Text

1. Unilateral grant of a one-year delay on all Obamacare health insurance requirements.
2. Unilateral delay of the employer mandate.
3. Unilateral delay of out-pocket caps.
4. Allowing congressional staff to continue on government-subsidized health care.

Category Two : Pending Court Challenges

1. Violates the Origination Clause because it’s a revenue-raising bill that originated in the Senate.
2. Contraception/abortifacient mandate violates religious liberties.
3. Expansion of employer mandate’s penalty through IRS regulation.

Add to those the individual mandate (which the Supreme Court struck down before Chief Justice Roberts rewrote and upheld the provision as a tax), the coerced expansion of Medicaid (which the Court made voluntary), and the Independent Payment Advisory Board(litigation ongoing), and you’ve got an even ten. And that’s without straining to find the constitutional defects buried in thousands of pages of legislation and hundreds of thousands of pages of regulations.

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