Companies Must Now Swear — to the IRS — That None of Their Layoffs Are Because of Obamacare
...Consider what administration officials announcing the new exemption for medium-sized employers had to say about firms that might fire workers to get under the threshold and avoid hugely expensive new requirements of the law. Obama officials made clear in a press briefing that firms would not be allowed to lay off workers to get into the preferred class of those businesses with 50 to 99 employees. How will the feds know what employers were thinking when hiring and firing? Simple. Firms will be required to certify to the IRS – under penalty of perjury – that ObamaCare was not a motivating factor in their staffing decisions. To avoid ObamaCare costs you must swear that you are not trying to avoid ObamaCare costs. You can duck the law, but only if you promise not to say so....

Congressional Investigation: Treasury, IRS, HHS Conspired To Create An Unauthorized, Half-Trillion Dollar Entitlement.
...Last week, two congressional committees issued a little-noticed report detailing how Treasury Department, Internal Revenue Service, and Health and Human Services officials conspired to create a massive new entitlement not authorized anywhere in federal law.

In the summer of 2012, the House of Representatives’ Committee on Oversight & Government Reform and Committee on Ways & Means launched an investigation to determine “whether IRS and Treasury conducted an adequate review of the statute and legislative history prior to coming to [the] conclusion that [the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act's] premium subsidies would be allowed in federal exchanges.” Over the next 18 months, the committees held numerous hearings with senior Treasury and IRS officials, while investigative staff conducted interviews with key agency attorneys responsible for developing the regulations in question. Investigators also reviewed what few documents Treasury and IRS officials allowed them to see....

Democrats, Media Slam President Romney Over Health Care Law Changes
In a move certain to please his conservative supporters and infuriate his critics, President Romney announced this afternoon that his administration would make yet another change to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. In a terse release, posted without fanfare to the Department of Health and Human Services website, officials revealed that the law’s employer mandate would be suspended until 2016 for all businesses that employ between 50 and 99 people.

The move comes hot on the heels of news that the agency would not be enforcing the provisions in the law that require Americans to buy approved health insurance until after the next election. Now, as then, a simple explanation was forthcoming. “The president won,” a White House aide told National Review Online. “His disdain for the law was ratified by the people. Now he’s going to fundamentally transform it.”

“This is an utter disgrace,” griped Senator Chuck Schumer (D, N.Y). “This law was passed through Congress, signed by the previous president, and upheld by the Supreme Court.”...

Obamacare lawlessness charge sticks
...The Post’s editorial board explains just how indefensible is the president’s “increasingly cavalier approach to picking and choosing how to enforce this law.” They warn Obama supporters: “Imagine how Democrats would respond if a President Rand Paul, say, moved into the White House in 2017 and announced he was going to put off provisions of Obamacare he thought might be too onerous to administer. … The law is also explicit that the government should be enforcing penalties already; that’s the plainest interpretation of Congress’s intent. The administration shouldn’t dismiss that without exceptionally good reason. Fear of a midterm shellacking doesn’t qualify as good reason.” (And it might even contribute to that shellacking.)

In a comment that reveals more about pundits than about Obamacare, Ron Fournier lets on that he can’t bear any longer to make up excuses for the White House. (Fournier has hardly been the worst offender; far too many have made covering for the president a virtual job requirement. Liberals may have ended JournoList, but the JournoList mentality remained.) Fournier rightly observes that the problem started with the passage of the bill: “The win-at-all-cost mentality helped create a culture in which a partisan-line vote was deemed sufficient for passing transcendent legislation. It spurred advisers to develop a dishonest talking point—’If you like your health plan, you’ll be able to keep your health plan.’ And political expediency led Obama to repeat the line, over and over and over again, when he knew, or should have known, it was false.” And it led liberals to excuse it all.

Kirsten Power echoed Fournier’s sentiments, bemoaning the fate of those “who have supported the law, who support universal health care, [who] are constantly put in the position of having to defend this president, who has really incompetently put this together, rolled it out.”...