Andrew Napolitano: Trump has committed the most revolutionary act I've seen in 45 yearsFox News, Jan 26, 2017, Judge Andrew Napolitano
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With the stroke of a pen, the president assaulted the heart of the law that was the domestic centerpiece of his predecessor’s administration. How did this happen? How can a U.S. president, who took an oath to enforce the laws faithfully, gut one of them merely because he disagrees with it?
Here is the back story.
When ObamaCare went through Congress in 2010, all Democrats in Congress supported it and all congressional Republicans were opposed. The crux of their disagreement was the law’s command that everyone in the United States obtain and maintain health insurance -- a command that has come to be known as “the individual mandate.”
Republicans argued that Congress was without the authority to compel people to enter the marketplace by purchasing a product -- that such decisions should be freely made by individuals and that that freedom was protected from governmental interference by the Constitution. Democrats argued that the commerce clause of the Constitution, which permits Congress to regulate commerce among the states, also permits it to compel commercial activity on the part of individuals who make up a highly regulated component of interstate commerce.
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Though Congress did not call it a tax and the government’s lawyers uniformly and consistently denied in all courts where it was challenged that it was a tax and President Barack Obama rejected the idea that it was a tax and even the lawyers for the challengers denied it was a tax, a 5-4 majority in the Supreme Court characterized the money collected by the IRS from noncompliant individuals as a tax.
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He (Trump) ordered that regulations already in place be enforced with a softer, more beneficent tone, and he ordered that no penalty, fine, setoff or tax be imposed by the IRS on any person or entity who is not complying with the individual mandate, because by the time taxes are due on April 15, the IRS will be without authority to impose or collect the non-tax tax, as the individual mandate will no longer exist. Why take money from people that will soon be returned?
Then he ordered a truly revolutionary act, the likes of which I have never seen in the 45 years I have studied and monitored the government’s laws and its administration of them. He ordered that when bureaucrats who are administering and enforcing the law have discretion with respect to the time, place, manner and severity of its enforcement, they should exercise that discretion in favor of individuals and against the government.
This is radical coming from any president in the modern era of government-can-do-no-wrong. It is far more Thomas Jefferson, the small-government champion with whom Trump has never been associated, than it is Theodore Roosevelt, the super-regulator whom Trump has stated he admires. It recognizes the primacy and dignity of the individual and the fallibility of the state. It acknowledges the likely demise of ObamaCare. It is utterly without precedent since Jefferson’s presidency.
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http://www.foxnews.com/opinion/2017/01/26/andrew-napolitano-trump-has-committed-most-revolutionary-act-ive-seen-in-45-years.html
