Trump And Schumer’s Spat Over Obamacare’s Cost-Sharing Reductions Is Ominous
For the president, as for Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, the cost-sharing reduction payments should be a binary choice: Does a lawful appropriation for the payments exist, or not?
By Christopher Jacobs
July 31, 2017 Leaders in both parties engaged in rhetorical bluster over the weekend regarding Obamacare’s cost-sharing reductions. Those payments to insurers for lowering deductibles and co-payments—ruled unconstitutional by a federal district court judge last May—remain in political limbo, and a subject of no small controversy.
But the rhetorical exchanges yielded inconvenient truths, both for Democratic leaders demanding the Trump administration continue the payments, and for the president himself, who has threatened to stop them.
Schumer: If the Payments Are Constitutional, Trump Can’t Withhold ThemSenate Majority Leader Schumer tweeted about what might happen “if @POTUS refuses to make CSR [cost-sharing reduction] payments.” There’s just one problem with his statement: If the payments are lawful, President Trump cannot refuse to make them. More than four decades ago, the Supreme Court held unanimously in Train v. City of New York that the Nixon administration could not spend smaller amounts than what Congress appropriated for a environment program.
Schumer therefore implicitly admitted—as elsewhere—that the payments are not only illegal, but unconstitutional. Obamacare lacks an explicit appropriation for the cost-sharing reduction payments. That’s the reason Judge Rosemary Collyer ruled the Obama administration’s actions in making said payments unconstitutional last year. (The ruling is currently stayed pending appeals.)
As one summary of the case noted, Train v. City of New York established the principle that “the President cannot frustrate the will of Congress by killing a program through impoundment.” Yet Schumer, in asking the Trump administration to continue making payments to a program that Congress never funded in the first place, wants the executive unilaterally—and unconstitutionally—to frustrate the expressed will of the legislative branch, thereby diminishing Schumer’s own authority as a lawmaker.
It’s highly likely Schumer, a lawyer who spent several years serving on both the House and Senate judiciary committees, knows full well the nature of unconstitutional actions, begun by the last administration, that he wants the current one to continue. But if he wants to have any credibility on the rule of law—whether criticizing the Trump administration’s other “abuses,” or standing up for the independence of the Russia investigation—he would be wise to 1) admit that the Obama administration violated the Constitution in making the payments to begin with and 2) hold the last administration just as accountable as he wants to hold the current president.
Trump: Upholding the Constitution Is a ChoiceConversely, the president seems to delight in dangling in front of Democrats the prospect of cancelling the CSR payments, as he did most recently on Twitter Saturday, one day after the Senate failed to approve a “skinny” health-care repeal.
<..snip..>
http://thefederalist.com/2017/07/31/trump-schumers-spat-obamacares-cost-sharing-reductions-scary/
