Why I Sued the President

[Valin]

National Review:

West Virginia’s attorney general steps up.

Patrick Morrisey

August 21, 2014

 

President Obama has dared those who criticize his repeated failure to faithfully execute the laws to “sue me,” believing that no one can show the injury needed to do so. But when one of the administration’s many lawless actions shifted certain responsibilities to the states, we gained the standing to sue that so many others have lacked. So on July 29, I accepted the president’s invitation and filed a lawsuit on behalf of the state of West Virginia to hold the Obama administration accountable for its illegal conduct. Though we are a small state — with approximately 1.8 million people — our lawsuit speaks for the millions more who wish to sue but cannot.

 

The president and his administration have ignored the law on a breathtaking range of issues. For example, President Obama directed the Environmental Protection Agency to propose new environmental rules that will devastate coal miners and raise electricity prices sky-high, even though the EPA admits that the “literal” terms of the Clean Air Act prohibit the regulations. Similarly, after he failed to pass immigration reform through Congress, the president decided to ignore the laws on the books and give out work permits as he pleases. He did the same thing with the Affordable Care Act, giving billions of dollars of tax credits that the law does not authorize. Finally, when Americans learned that the president could not keep his promise that “if you like your health plan, you can keep it,” he ordered the Department of Health and Human Services to create an “administrative fix” — to stop enforcing politically unpopular parts of the law.

 

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Our lawsuit specifically challenges the president’s “administrative fix” to Obamacare, which was designed to remedy a flaw within the Affordable Care Act that resulted in Americans with health insurance losing their coverage. But rather than properly change the law, which Congress said it was willing to do, the president unilaterally “fixed” it by ceasing federal enforcement of the plan-canceling provisions. Because of the way the law is written, this abdication by the federal government had the unusual effect of shifting enforcement responsibility to the states. This increased responsibility gives us the standing to sue.

 

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