Civics 101

On Funding ObamaCare

By Brian M. Carney

In the current budget debate, Barack Obama and his supporters are fond of saying, as the president did again Wednesday, that Congress should allow the "Treasury to pay for things that Congress itself already authorized," as if this should end the argument. A variation on this theme is the contention that the Affordable Care Act is "the law of the land," and therefore Congress has no choice but to authorize spending to implement it.

With this argument is that while a Congress did pass the ACA, this Congress didn't. The 113th Congress is under no obligation to fund what the 111th Congress passed. Control of Congress is currently divided, and even if it weren't, Mr. Obama would never sign a bill repealing ObamaCare. But it doesn't follow from this that Republicans are or should be obliged to fund what a previous Congress passed.

Great Britain doesn't have a formal, written constitution, but it does have certain constitutional principles. One of those is that no Parliament may bind its successors—what is passed by one group of lawmakers may always be modified or overturned by a subsequent one.

The point doesn't get as much emphasis in the U.S. as in Britain, but it's no less essential on the American side of the Atlantic. If appropriating funding for authorized programs were meant to be automatic, one could well ask why we bother with appropriations bills at all. Appropriations have always been used to influence existing policies and programs, and rightly so. It is disingenuous for the president to argue otherwise.