Unilateral Determinations

 

 

 

"Who cares what we agreed to - I will just change the dang thing!"

Please hang in there for a wee bit while I set the table for this article. In my working days, I spend most of my time negotiating contracts with the Federal Government. I also did negotiations with other companies and countries, but the US Government was always my biggest and most frequent customer.

Once a contract was signed, there was only three ways to change it. First, the primary customer in Washington, or my company, could request a change. It would then be negotiated, and a modification to contract would result, signed by both parties. Second, the local government representative could change the contract by an amendment. Again, it was a negotiated action, agreed to and signed by both parties. Third, there could be unilateral determinations made by the government. Situations that would allow these unilateral determinations were spelled out in the frame of the basic contract, or in the ancillary statutory or regulatory provisions thereto.

There! Now that I got all that mumbo jumbo out of the way, you might be wondering what this has to do with the price of tea in China. ObamaCare. Plain and simple ObamaCare. Yesterday, one more unilateral change was announced. This thing has now has more changes in it than a high school term paper. All unilateral determinations. All illegal if you ask me. This was a law passed by the Legislative Branch and then signed by the Executive Branch. Kind of the way our Constitution requires things.

For the President to change one of the basic tenants of this highly complex (and convoluted) law, there is a Constitutional way to do it. Since we do not have a monarchy, the President is not empowered to make even one change to the law. He needs to request the change through Congress.

It would be like your mortgage company sending you a letter saying they just changed the term or the percentage of your mortgage. They cant do that. And the President can't just willy-nilly change anything he wants to. Of all people! He (supposedly) taught Constitutional Law for crying out loud!

So here we sit, with this behemoth of a law that few like and even fewer understand. It is so hosed up, it has needed to go through numerous (and illegal) changes. And I don't believe we are done yet. My question however is this - why has nobody called the President on these illegal changes? In my opinion, after the first change was made, the law should have become a nullity.

As for me, I am going to start becoming more of an activist on this mess called ObamaCare. It is a tort to our Jurisprudence. It needs to go away and quickly. This "signature law" for the President will to down in history alright - just not the way he imagined.