ninetogo

Tom Fitton, President of Judicial Watch shared on the JW weekly blog the current standing of a lawsuit filed due to Obama Administration violating Obamacare Law. See the attached article:

Obama Administration Violates Obamacare

Judicial Watch lawyers took a crucial next step in one of our legal challenges to President Obama's lawlessness. Judicial Watch lawyers asked the full court of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit to rehear Kawa Orthodontics LLP's challenge against the Obama administration's decision to ignore the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and unilaterally delay the implementation of the "employer mandate." We believe this could have significant reverberations as it cuts to the heart of lawlessness embedded within the Obama administration's handling of the ACA, which widely known as Obamacare.

Back in July 2013, the Obama administration unilaterally -- and without the authority of any law passed by Congress - disregarded a statutory deadline and announced that the mandate would be delayed until 2015. That should be a legal non-starter, since the law expressly requires it to take effect on January 1, 2014. The Obama administration subsequently delayed the mandate a second time. It is now scheduled to take effect in 2016.

We initially sued the U.S. Department of Treasury, the Internal Revenue Service, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew and the Commissioner of the IRS over the delay, on behalf of Kawa, back on October 1, 2013. This has been a tough fight.

A lower federal court in Florida initially dismissed the Kawa lawsuit for lack of standing in January 2014. On December 2, 2014, by a 2-1 v**e, a divided three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit upheld the lower court's decision. But thankfully, Judge Beverly Baldwin Martin, who was appointed to the federal bench by President Clinton and nominated to the Eleventh Circuit by President Obama, dissented from her colleagues. Judge Martin noted that a business that lost money, as did Kawa Orthodontics, would indeed have standing:
Kawa has shown that it has sustained an injury as a result of the government's decision to delay enforcement of the employer mandate. It spent money on compliance costs two years earlier than necessary, and therefore lost two years of interest on those expenditures. Under basic rules of accounting, "[a] dollar today is worth more than a dollar tomorrow ..."

Here, had Kawa spent money to ensure its compliance with the employer mandate in 2015 instead of 2013, it could have earned an additional two years of interest on that money. Or, instead of earning interest, Kawa could have invested that money in other endeavors to generate two years' worth of added profits to the company.

We clearly have the law on our side. In our en banc rehearing request, our attorneys point out that the panel's ruling conflicts with another Eleventh Circuit ruling which granted standing to individuals who were challenging the individual mandate at the heart of the Obamacare law. This would be the Florida v. U.S. Dep't of Health and Human Services lawsuit. We also explain how in the Florida case, the plaintiffs had also alleged anticipatory compliance costs for the individual mandate, which the Eleventh Circuit ruled was sufficient to grant standing. Ironically, in considering the Florida and other challenges, a deeply divided Supreme Court ultimately ruled in 2012 that Obamacare was constitutional in several key measures.

Here is the key passage from our rehearing request:
In other words, this Court has already determined that the expenditure of anticipatory compliance costs is sufficient to confer standing. In Florida, the individual plaintiffs were injured by the enactment of the law because they had to spend money to comply with the law. In the instant matter, Kawa Ortho was injured because the subsequent delay meant that it spent money too early.

Here's the problem from a business perspective. As a "large employer," Kawa Orthodontics, which owned by Dr. Larry Kawa, is subject to the "employer mandate." Kawa Orthodontics spent substantial time and money in 2013 in anticipation of the mandate taking effect in 2014. It also incurred significant "opportunity costs" preparing for the mandate instead of pursuing other business opportunities. Kawa Orthodontics estimates that it could have generated approximately $1.2 million in new revenue for its practice had it not spent approximately 100 hours of time determining how best to comply with the "employer mandate."

Dr. Kawa has made the point that Obama's lawlessness has caused damage not just to America's constitutional system but to countless businesses across the country. That's why it's vital for the court to take up this case.

The basic question here is does the executive branch have the authority to ignore a clear, Congressionally-imposed deadline? If the answer is yes, we no longer live in the country that we know.