Sen. Ted Cruz, Texas Republican who helped engineer a lengthy government funding stalemate earlier this year in a bid to block money for the new health care law, said many aspects of the Affordable Care Act are “constitutionally or statutorily suspect” and that the entire law should be repealed.
“Democrats forced a government shutdown instead of agreeing to a congressional delay of Obamacare, but now the Obama administration is unilaterally delaying it,” he wrote in his report. “This undermines the rule of law.”
In July, the Obama administration announced a one-year delay of the employer mandate requiring larger firms to provide health insurance to full-time employees. Republicans criticized the move as an attempt to implement an unpopular provision after the mid-term elections. “Obamacare does not allow ‘official’ congressional staff to continue receiving pre-Obamacare federal health insurance plans; instead these staff are forced to go through the Obamacare exchanges to purchase health insurance,” he said. “So just like average Americans, these individual congressional staffers will have to purchase a plan for themselves.”
The outspoken freshman senator also said the health care law violates the Constitution’s so-called origination clause, because it raises revenue but the bill did not originate in the House. Instead, he said, Democrats played a “shell game” by stripping out language from an unrelated House bill to replace it with the health law.
He also comes down on the side of plaintiffs leading two high-profile legal challenges to the law.
His report says the Obama administration infringed on business owners’ religious freedoms by forcing larger corporations to insure contraception, and that it violated the plain language of the health care law by extending premium subsidies to states that let the federal government run their exchanges.
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