Sen. Cruz Chairs Judiciary Hearing on Obamacare Subsidies; Obama Administration Officials Refuse to Attend

On Thursday, I held a hearing in the Judiciary Subcommittee on Oversight, Agency Action, Federal Rights and Federal Courts to examine the Department of Treasury’s rulemaking that has disregarded the text of the law and illegally enabled the IRS to provide federal Obamacare subsidies to millions of Americans. I invited Treasury officials, but they refused to attend.

The empty table before us was a symbol for how little regard the Obama Administration has for the American people. This is fundamentally about the question of whether the federal government can impose billions of dollars of taxes upon millions of Americans directly contrary to the text of federal law. It is likewise about whether the federal government can spend billions of dollars explicitly prohibited by federal law. If the answer to both of those questions is yes, if the Administration’s interpretation is acceded to, it makes the entire constitutional law-making function superfluous.

These penalties coming from the individual mandate disproportionally hurt the most vulnerable among us. The people being hurt by these illegal taxes… are young people, they are single moms, they are Hispanics, they are African Americans, that are suddenly finding a big tax bill that is due from an administration that is ignoring and violating federal law to extract illegal taxes.

Though the first panel failed to attend, the second panel consisted of the following legal and health care experts: Michael A. Carvin, partner at Jones Day; Michael F. Cannon, Director of Health Policy Studies at the Cato Institute; Andy Grewal, Associate Professor of Law at the University of Iowa College of Law; Elizabeth B. Wydra, Chief Counsel of the Constitutional Accountability Center; and Robert N. Weiner, partner at Arnold & Porter LLP.

Last week, I sent a letter to U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Jacob Lew regarding the department’s refusal to supply key witnesses for the hearing and stating that he may have no choice but to pursue other options, including compulsory process.