WASHINGTON — A federal judge ruled Wednesday that the House had the right to sue the Obama administration over billions of dollars in health care spending, a decision that poses a new legal threat to the health care law and gave congressional Republicans a victory in their claims of executive overreach by the White House.
In a significant defeat for the administration, United States District Court Judge Rosemary M. Collyer found that the House had made a compelling case that suing the White House was the only way to preserve its constitutional power to control federal spending and stop the administration from distributing $136 billion in insurance company subsidies that Republicans say Congress never approved.
“The House of Representatives as an institution would suffer a concrete, particularized injury if the Executive were able to draw funds from the Treasury without a valid appropriation,” Judge Collyer said in her decision.
She said the merits of the claim would be determined in a later proceeding. But her decision, if it withstands appeal, would mark the first time that the House has been able to challenge an administration in court over its spending power. The decision noted that “no precedent dictates the outcome.”
Speaker John A. Boehner had pressed the lawsuit both as a way to attack the health care law and to underscore what congressional Republicans say is a pattern by the Obama administration of exceeding its authority on a range of issues including health care, immigration, and pollution controls.
“The president’s unilateral change to Obamacare was unprecedented and outside the powers granted to his office under our Constitution,” Mr. Boehner said in a statement after the ruling. “I am grateful to the court for ruling that this historic overreach can be challenged by the coequal branch of government with the sole power to create or change the law.”
The judge dismissed another challenge to the law by the House, finding that the House’s claim that the Obama administration had improperly moved the deadlines for new employer requirements without congressional approval did not meet the constitutional test.
The fight over the employer mandate was initially the central claim in the Republican lawsuit that was strongly opposed by House Democrats. But Republicans shifted their focus to the spending issue when the flow of money was first discovered by staff members at the House Energy and Commerce Committee.
Supporters of the Affordable Care Act say language in the law states clearly that government reimbursement to private insurance companies to help cover health care premiums are mandatory and not subject to Congress’s annual spending bills.
The White House did not immediately respond to the decision but had been prepared for a loss at the district court level and predicted it would ultimately prevail on appeal. A Justice Department official said the agency would move to appeal the ruling.
Justice Department lawyers representing the Department of Health and Human Services argued at a May hearing that the case amounted to a political dispute that should be settled in Congress, not in the courts.
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