Pressed by a newspaper editorial board on how he could legally block Obamacare from taking effect as president, Mitt Romney said they should talk to his lawyer for further details.
Romney has pledged to issue waivers to every state to get them out of the Affordable Care Act’s requirements, which he told the Washington Examiner on Wednesday would help delay the bill’s implementation while he tried to repeal it in Congress.
“The American people don’t want it, I don’t want it, and we’ll repeal it,” he said. “And if the waiver process is able to successfully stop it in its tracks, as we think it will, great. It doesn’t stop everything of course. Some elements go on. The tax being collected and so forth, that you can’t get out of that by waiver – it requires the ultimate repeal.”
But The Washington Examiner’s Philip Klein noted that under the law, waivers won’t take effect until after a hypothetical Romney administration’s first term, prompting Romney to eventually refer him to the campaign’s attorney, Ben Ginsberg, who was counsel to President Bush for his two presidential races.
KLEIN: But what do your lawyers think as to why these waivers could take place, because I have the law here, and it says that it applies on January 1, 2017 – under the “waiver for state innovation.”
ROMNEY: When you say “it” — “it applies”?
KLEIN: The “waiver for state innovation” — under section 1332.
ROMNEY: The waiver for state innovation?
KLEIN: Yes, that’s the waiver that I believe that you’re talking about when you talk about state waivers. That’s what your campaign has said.
ROMNEY: Oh, they say it’s that in particular?
KLEIN: Yeah.
ROMNEY: Then I’d have to have Ben Ginsberg, our lawyer, sit down. If you really want to go into that and tell you what — if that’s important to you, we’ll have Ben Ginsberg give you a call and talk about what provision of the law we would seek to employ.
