Progressive Critics of Trump’s HHS Are Sliming Christians for Enforcing the Law

by David French January 22, 2018 3:30 PM @DavidAFrench

 

Efforts to undo the Obama administration’s unconstitutional subversion of Congress are welcome and long overdue. This morning, Politico made me laugh, opening an article about the Trump administration’s department of Health and Human Services with this incredibly misleading paragraph:

A small cadre of politically prominent evangelicals inside the Department of Health and Human Services have spent months quietly planning how to weaken federal protections for abortion and transgender care — a strategy that’s taking shape in a series of policy moves that took even their own staff by surprise.

The reality is that theTrump HHS has issued a notice of a proposed rule (essentially, a draft regulation for public review and comment) that will empower the agency to robustly enforce multiple statutes passed by Congress and signed by presidents from both parties statutes that the Obama administration had unlawfully and unilaterally revised or undermined.............

 

The Obama HHS, for example, both dragged its feet on enforcement and passed regulations that actually undermined the intent of the law as written by Congress. In fact, it issued a rule that quite literally changed a statute. Section 1557 of the Affordable Care Act prohibits discrimination on the basis of “race, color, national origin, sex, age, or disability” in federally funded health programs, HHS health programs, and “Health Insurance Marketplaces.” In its regulations, however, Obama’s HHS unilaterally expanded the nondiscrimination categories to include “gender identity” and “termination of pregnancy.”................Read more