The Law is Whatever Barry Says It Is

“White House delays health insurance mandate for medium-sized employers until 2016,” the Washington Post reports:

The Obama administration announced Monday it would give medium-sized employers an extra year, until 2016, before they must offer health insurance to their full-time workers.

Firms with at least 100 employees will have to start offering this coverage in 2015.

By offering an unexpected grace period to businesses with between 50 and 99 employees, administration officials are hoping to defuse another potential controversy involving the 2010 health-care law, which has become central to Republicans’ campaign to make political gains in this year’s midterm election.

Even before the new announcement, Scott Powell posited in an Investor’s Business Daily posited that “ObamaCare Disaster May Deliver Mortal Blow To Liberalism:”

As it was, without a single Republican vote, several Democratic senators had to be bribed by the Obama administration before they would join in jamming the bill through on straight party lines.

Then there’s the recent revelation that the bill would not have passed but for the biggest lie of all from President Obama himself. Now everyone knows that if you liked your plan, your doctor and your deductible, you can’t keep them.

Health care insurance companies have also been betrayed by the president’s executive orders changing coverage rules after the law was enacted — causing actuarial turmoil.

The result is a genuine crisis for liberalism — not the least of which is that government’s social contract with the American people has been fundamentally broken, with a majority now feeling that Washington under Obama and progressive Democrats is arbitrary, coercive and untrustworthy.

What the Democratic Party’s effort to remake one-sixth of the economy in restructuring health care delivery has totally ignored is the vital role of entrepreneurial input, individual choice and the free flow of information, which are at the heart of delivering quality and low cost in every industry.

As Hayek warned would be the case over 60 years ago.

Related: At Hot Air, Allahpundit offers three points in response to the White House’s latest shifting of goal posts:

One: It’ll be a stump-speech staple for every Republican running in 2016 that he intends to delay ObamaCare indefinitely, root and branch, if elected. Obama’s now set the precedent that he can suspend parts of the law simply because he finds them politically inconvenient. That precedent will be built upon. Two: The GOP might sue to force him to enforce the mandate, although the politics of that are tricky. No one likes the mandate, especially Republicans’ benefactors in the business lobby. Successfully suing O over this, even if it’s for the noble constitutional purpose of compelling the president to faithfully execute the law, would mean making ObamaCare even more onerous than it is. Good for rolling back executive overreach, not so good for the economy.

Three: This should be it for immigration reform. If Obama’s answer to Boehner’s “we don’t trust you” charge is to double down on one of his most egregious executive power grabs, there’s no way Republicans will trust him on border security now. And of course O knows it, which makes me think he’s already decided to compound this illegal action with some sort of unilateral mass amnesty by executive order later this year or next. There’s no going back.

In the meantime, Obamacare’s defenders “are finding it necessary to fight battles on its behalf they had no idea they would have to fight and for which they are understandably ill-prepared,” John Podhoretz noted last week at Commentary:

It’s one thing to say the law is necessary, and that it will have good effects; it’s quite another to have to say it’s OK that it will lead people out of the workforce in order to collect government benefits—and nyah nyah nyah Republicans and conservatives. ObamaCare is now law, and the degree to which is is a badly-designed, jury-rigged mess is mostly what people are coming to know about it. That is why I said this report may mark the moment its doom was sealed—because it’s springing leaks in places no one ever thought he was going to have to patch, even as Obama and his people continue to try to plug the holes that everyone already knows about.

As I asked earlier today, how sustainable is Peak Orwell?

Exit question: