Congress governs self under 'Obamacare'

AP via Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel ^ | 11/1/13 | Laurie Kellman, The Associated Press

[Jean S]

WASHINGTON (AP) Think you're confused by "Obamacare"? It's roiling Capitol Hill behind the scenes, too.

Members of Congress are governing themselves under President Barack Obama's signature law, which means they have great leeway in how to apply it to their own staffs.

For House members and senators, it's about a section of the law that may or may not require lawmakers to toss some staffers off their federal health insurance and into the Affordable Care Act's exchanges. The verdict from congressional officers is ultimately that lawmakers, as employers, have discretion over who among their staffs gets ejected, and who stays. And they don't have to say who, how many or why.

What they all say is this:

"I followed the law," said Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., echoing Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and others.

But the law as written is open to broad interpretation, inspiring a bureaucratic web of memos, regulations and guidance that members of Congress say allows them to proceed on the question of staffers and coverage as they see fit. Lawmakers this week were required to finalize plans for who stays on federal insurance and who's forced onto an exchange.

The Affordable Care Act, signed into law in 2010, only requires members of Congress and their "official" staff members to get health insurance through one of the law's marketplaces, or exchanges. Guidance memos from the Senate's financial clerk and the House's chief administrative officer, obtained by The Associated Press, define "official" aides as those who work in the lawmakers' personal offices. Committee and leadership aides, then, would be exempt and could stay on the federal health insurance program.

Unless lawmakers decide otherwise.

[ExTexasRedhead]

Find out the names and then vote them out of office. If these staff members are sent back to the real world with their Congress critter, they’re in this mess with We The People. DC Royalty?

[tumblindice]

In any event, if they’re wrong/caught all they have to do is say, “Sorry!”

[Dick Bachert]

In Federalist Number 57, James Madison wrote that Congress “can make no law which will not have its full operation on themselves and their friends, as well as on the great mass of the society.”

As wise an idea as this was, Madison and the other Framers failed to expressly incorporate such a limit on government within the Constitution itself.

How silly of Madison to think that our all-knowing, all-wise modern masters who are clearly superior to those dead old white guys should have to live under the laws they impose on us inferior and ignorant clods infesting flyover country.

I believe we need several amendments to the Constitution. How about you??

[JoanneSD]

The verdict from congressional officers is ultimately that lawmakers, as employers, have discretion over who among their staffs gets ejected, and who stays.

How silly of me I thought they worked for us...as taxpayers

[tumblindice]

This is the problem the framers pointed out in the Federalist Papers, where you have employees who set their own wages and benefits.
Compounding the problem, about half the population has figured out they can do the same thing for themselves.
Eventually the wagon creaks to a halt. (Don’t forget ‘Boxer’ the workhouse. The pigs sent him to a glue-factory ‘rest home’!)

[nothingnew]

Find out the names and then vote them out of office.

Is this part of the Friday Sillines Thread? Vote them out? You silly.

FMCDH(BITS)