...companies who embrace the delay can layoff, restructure, and hire part time workers, but only if they swear to the IRS they are not doing so because of Obamacare
Nobody in the Regime wants a record of how many people were laid off because of Obamacare.
I think the key here has to do with the SCOTUS "It's a tax" decision. Roberts may have done us all a favor. (Probably unwittingly so)
If a tax, it must be applied uniformly. If a mandate, then all kinds of restrictions and conditions may be applied. If it's a Mandate, then it's unconstitutional.
Is Roberts waiting for a case?
I look forward to a response.
...companies who embrace the delay can layoff, restructure, and hire part time workers, but only if they swear to the IRS they are not doing so because of Obamacare...
That would make sense but the timing of the employer mandate delay and the IRS announcement are more than a year apart. So it still does not add up even taking into account the taxation argument which I get to later. Here's the reasoning:
Note the fact that the vast majority of American businesses are honest and law abiding. We can be assured that most every business will not lie especially under penalty of perjury.
Businesses have announced over the past 2 years up until recently that they are laying off or reducing FT workers to PT because of Obamacare. This has been in the news and there have been no rebuttals. Employer notices to employees announcing these actions have been published and the reasoning for these actions have been attributed to Obamacare.
Nobody in the Regime wants a record of how many people were laid off because of Obamacare.
Perhaps more precisely a record is wanted that states that layoffs and reductions are not related to Obamacare.
I think the key here has to do with the SCOTUS "It's a tax" decision. Roberts may have done us all a favor. (Probably unwittingly so)
Roberts did no favors unwittingly or otherwise. The Commerce Clause arguments were strong so he wrote in support of these arguments. The tax arguments that were presented were possible to ignore but he let stand the tax basis for the law. It is true that the PPACA was not presented publicly as a tax but it was argued INSIDE THE COURT as a tax by Obama's lawyers.
On March 21, 2010 Rush Limbaugh and other media were discussing legal challenges that would be mounted against the PPACA. Most media were chasing Commerce Clause arguments but Rush mentioned a 'tax' argument that FDR had used for Social Security.
I researched the background and history of FDR's tax arguments. It was revealing that FDR progressives had wanted a national health insurance program but let this effort be put off to the future. Legal challenges to FDR's new deal programs and Social Security were formidable and much of FDR reforms were overturned in the courts.
Note that Social Security was not introduced as a tax.
It was against the backdrop of overturned reforms that FDR directed his lawyers to argue INSIDE THE COURT that Social Security was a tax yet OUTSIDE the court FDR continued to say that Social Security was not a tax. FDR later admitted that he had turned Social Security into a tax so that legislators would never overturn the program.
This is what became known as the 'FDR Playbook' and this is precisely what Pelosi-Biden-Obama used and referred to in that they were using the 'FDR Playbook'.
And I saw in the news that Obama's lawyers INSIDE THE COURT were arguing that PPACA was a tax.
I did my best here on FR to create awareness of what the real game was, that the PPACA would survive as a tax but everyone was so hopeful that Commerce Clause and 10th Amendment arguments would win the day that my utterances were lost in the noise.
Is Roberts waiting for a case?
No, I believe Roberts is still compromised. I do not think it is conspiracy to say that Obama's 'Chicago Way' tactics were used against Roberts in his quest to adopt children and have them naturalized. I believe criminal elements under Obama found this weakness in Robert's life and his dependency on government approval to see it through so he wrote the decision as a compromise. He was not 'clever', he was not 'brilliant'; he was simply compromised.
There is solid evidence that Roberts changed his view on PPACA at the last moment and wrote the compromise opinion. He could have written that the legislation was in character a mandate to force Americans to buy something they did not want and that this was inconsistent with the tax basis of the legal defense of the law. He could therefore have concluded the law was flawed constitutionally and would need to be redone to be in conformance with constitutional principles.
But Roberts wrote a weaker opinion, one that compromised the two arguments for and against the law. I am convinced and others have published that Roberts threw in the towel with the idea to let the American people sort it out. And I believe he did this to protect his children against the possibility that the federal government would deny his adoption and naturalization application or to investigate and overturn it. If you ever have dealt with the immigration bureaucracy, then you know how easy it is for government officials to turn your life upside down. Same with IRS matters.
As far as your 'Tax' vs. 'Mandate' distinctions, a century of income tax cases would counter the basis of your 'constitutional purity' approach. Under the Income tax code, the principle of 'uniformity' is applied but in 'clever' ways to circumvent legal challenges. For example, the individual income tax is often stated by IRS persons as a 'uniform' tax. This elicits laughter as it is a bizarre assertion. But the reasoning is that within each tax bracket the tax is uniformly applied.
Can this case unravel ACA? - - -
Religious liberty advocates and First Amendment defenders are cheering the stunning decision by U.S. District Judge Brian Cogan in New York that promises to speed up the unraveling of ObamaCare. Cogan not only found that the Health and Human Services (HHS) regulation that requires health insurance to include contraceptive coverage was constitutionally questionable, he actually forbade HHS from enforcing it.
As the New York Post details, in ruling on the lawsuit, Cogan decided that the plaintiffs “demonstrated that the mandate, despite accommodation, compels them to perform acts that are contrary to their religion. And there can be no doubt that the coercive pressure here is substantial.”
Most prior lawsuits have focused on the law’s constitutionality. Cogan’s ruling deals with its regulatory enforcement based on the phrase “the secretary shall determine” that appears in the Affordable Care Act no fewer than 1,005 times. This ruling essentially says that HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius cannot enforce a mandate that Congress did not approve and that she cannot unilaterally decide what the First Amendment means or whether it is rendered irrelevant by her edicts.
In other words, regulations do not trump the Constitution.
While the injunction is permanent, it applies only to the four groups that brought the lawsuit — Monsignor Farrell High School on Staten Island, Catholic Health Services of Long Island, the ArchCare health care group and Cardinal Spellman High School in the Bronx.
Yet the lawsuit is likely to be replicated nationwide by other groups. At last count, some 75 similar lawsuits have been filed by nonprofits and religious groups seeking relief from the contraceptive mandate, Jennifer Lee, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, told the New York Daily News.