Thousands of members of Congress and congressional staffers are benefiting from an illegal scheme that gives Congress special treatment both by exempting them from the harshest part of ObamaCare and by providing them each up to $12,000 in benefits that federal law prohibits them from receiving. Last week, the Heritage Foundation’s John Malcolm and I furnished additional evidence that the government officials who implemented this scheme violated federal criminal laws. (Malcolm is a former deputy assistant attorney general in the Department of Justice’s Criminal Division.) Few government officials or legal scholars are willing to defend this scheme. Those who are nevertheless have been unwilling to comment on these new revelations or to offer a legal basis for this scheme. At least one seems to suggest that, because the executive branch did it, it must be legal.
In brief, the Obama administration violated numerous federal laws, including criminal laws, to provide thousands of dollars of benefits to members of Congress for the purpose of preventing members from voting to change ObamaCare. Martha Stewart went to jail for less. Congress has proven unwilling to investigate this obvious fraud, precisely because members of Congress from both parties benefit from it. The Trump administration has kept this illegal arrangement going for the same reason the Justice Department has not investigated the crimes committed implementing it: the beneficiaries of this fraud are extremely powerful and united in their determination both to perpetuate it and to hide it from voters.
The scheme is illegal, as Malcolm and I explain, in part because it relies on Congress enrolling in coverage through the District of Columbia’s small-business Exchange (also known as a “SHOP” Exchange), even though both federal and D.C. law prohibit employers with more than 100 workers from participating in SHOP Exchanges. Congress employs thousands upon thousands of people. Congressional officials falsified the applications they submitted to the D.C. SHOP Exchange on behalf of the House and Senate by claiming each employs fewer than 100 people. All by themselves, those false statements are prosecutable under 18 U.S.C. § 1001, with each count exposing the responsible officials to up to five years in prison.
Malcolm and I found that after those false statements became public in late 2014, D.C. dropped the employer-size question from its SHOP Exchange applications. At a minimum, this means D.C. officials were not enforcing the limits federal and D.C. law place on SHOP Exchange participation. It also has the appearance of a cover-up: after congressional officials made potentially prosecutable false statements about Congress’ eligibility for a federal program, D.C. officials stopped asking all applicants about that eligibility criterion. And when those officials continued to make other false statements on their applications, the D.C. government just stopped requiring applications entirely. Finally, we found Congress has since admitted to D.C. that it employs thousands of people and that D.C.’s SHOP Exchange has never turned down any employer for participation based on the employer’s size.
Read more at https://www.cato.org/blog/congress-illegal-obamacare-exemption-its-nixonian-defenders
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