Changing the Laws

When I asked you about Obama changing the laws, I didn't go into specifics because I thought you would be familiar with it. I didn't get this from any off-the-wall source, I got it from out local newspaper and the TV news. Our local paper gets all their national news from the AP wire service, and what little TV news I watch is on NBC, CBS, and the Bloomberg Channel. These are the ones I remember, but there may be more:

The first one I remember was way back when Obama first got elected. Several states had already legalized medical marijuana and, since then, Colorado has legalized it for recreational use. When the first state legalized it for medical use, I believe it was either California or Oregon, Bush was still in office. He announced that legalizing it at the state level would have no effect on the federal drug laws, which the feds would continue to enforce. After Obama took office, he announced that the feds would not enforce the federal drug laws in states that had legalized pot. Presumably, they would still enforce them in the sates that hadn't legalized it, although I don't remember him specifically saying that. Okay, I guess he didn't really change this law, he just said that he wasn't going to enforce it any longer. Nevertheless, I've never heard of a president doing that either. The only thing I can find in the constitution (Article II, Section 3) says that the president "shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed". It doesn't say that he can pick and choose which laws he wants to enforce.

Some time after that, Obama announced that he would no longer enforce the federal Defense of Marriage Act because he believed that it was unconstitutional. He may have been right about that because the Supreme Court later did declare it unconstitutional. Traditionally, it has been the Supreme Court's job to declare a law unconstitutional, although the constitution is kind of vague about that. It doesn't say that the president either can or cannot do it, so I'll give him that one.

The rest of the incidents I remember pertain to Obamacare. First he extended for one year the deadline for employers of more than 50 workers to either provide health insurance or pay a penalty. He said that he did that because unemployment was still too high in the country, and some employers had threatened to either lay off or refrain from hiring to bring them under the 50 worker limit. There was also something about employees having to work at least 30 hours a week to qualify, and some employers had threatened to reduce their hours to less than that.

Then there was a big hullabaloo about millions of people having their insurance policies cancelled because they didn't fit Obamacare criteria. Before the bill had passed, Obama had repeatedly promised that people who liked their current insurance could keep it. When the shit hit the fan, he decided to let that requirement slide for another year too, but the insurance companies said that it would be too much trouble to reinstate all those policies for only one year so they weren't going to do it.

Just recently he extended another Obamacare deadline for a year, but I can't remember what it was. I had it a half hour ago, but it seems to have slipped away. It will probably come back to me after I have signed off, in which case I'll tell you about it next time.

I suppose you could say that he didn't really change these laws, he just decided not to enforce parts of them for now. I assume that these deadlines were written into the original law, but maybe not, maybe congress left them up to the discretion of the president. I have never heard of that happening before, but that doesn't mean it never happened. I was hoping that you knew something about it, but you seem to be saying that none of this is true. Well, maybe not, but that's what I read in the paper and heard on the news so, if it's wrong, it's their fault not mine.