Obama Uses Executive Fiat To Protect Dems In 2014 Midterms From Obamacare Vote

By Susan Duclos

The Obama administration bypasses Congress by executive fiat to delay implementation of one of the most onerous, job killing aspects of Obamacare, the employer mandate which penalizes employers with more than 50 full-time workers who either don’t offer health insurance or whose employees who can’t afford insurance without taxpayer help.

Full time employment was changed from 40 hours a week to 30 in the Obamacare law, which is forcing employers that cannot afford to pay those additional healthcare costs to cut workers' hours to under 30, or close their doors.

By law the mandate was due to take effect in 2014, before the midterm elections, but now is delayed until 2015, after the midterms. (More is explained in the news clip about this delay of implementation until after the 2014 midterm elections, seen below)

It is unsurprising that conservatives would criticize Obama for his end run around Congress, but it is unexpected to see pro-Obamacare/Obama supporters, criticizing him for the very same lawlessness, as evidenced by far left liberal Ezra Klein, who states "Delaying Obamacare’s employer mandate is the right thing to do. Frankly, eliminating it — or at least utterly overhauling it — is probably the right thing to do. But the administration executing a regulatory end-run around Congress is not the right way to do it."

Republicans control the House of Representatives and Democrats control the Senate, but out of 33 Senate seats on the ballot in the 2014 midterm elections, 23 of them are held by Democrats right now and 14 of those Democrats, voted for Obamacare in 2010, but have not been up for reelection since that vote.

Those 14 are:

Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH)
Tom Harkin (D-IA)
Mark Begich (D-AK)
Mark Pryor (D-AR)
Mark Udall (D-CO)
Richard Durbin (D-IL)
Mary Landrieu (D-LA)
Al Franken (D-Minn)
Tom Udall (D-NM)
Kay Hagan (D-NC)
Jeff Merkley (D-OR)
Jack Reed (D-RI)
Tim Johnson (D-SD)
 Mark Warner (D-VA)

Obama knows what this unpopular employer mandate will do to the economy and that Democrats that voted for it will be punished in the 2014 midterms as they were in 2010, when studies found that had Democratic House members not voted for Obama, Democrats would have kept control of the House of Representatives, so this delay is nothing more than his attempt to protect members of his own party from suffering the consequences of their vote for Obamcare.

 Flashback, Washington Post-

A top Democrat acknowledged Thursday that President Obama’s health care bill hurt his party in 2010. And a new study suggests it cost the Democrats something pretty specific: their House majority.

[...]

The study, by five professors from institutions across the country, looks at the health care bill alongside other contentious votes in the 111th Congress and determines that, more so than the stimulus or the cap-and-trade energy bill, it cost Democrats seats. In fact, they lost almost exactly the number of seats that decided the majority.

The study ran 10,000 simulations of a scenario in which all vulnerable Democrats voted against the health care bill and found that the rejections would have saved Democrats an average of 25 seats, which would have made the House parties close to a tie. (Republicans won 63 seats overall, but the study suggests around 25 of them would have been salvaged.) 

If Democrats lose control of the Senate in 2014, Barack Obama becomes a true lame duck president and he will do anything, including breaking his own law, to protect Democrats.

Watch- The Obama Administration Delays The Employer Mandate Of Obamacare until 2015