To begin with, it should be obvious enough that the so-called “Affordable” Care Act that authorized Obamacare is not self-executing. Washington can call it “mandatory,” but if new spending approval were unnecessary, we would not be at a stalemate now. As the Heritage Foundation points out, supposedly mandatory spending is routinely withheld in the appropriations process, and key elements of Obamacare (such as the insurance exchanges, as Hans von Spakovsky explains) are not even deemed mandatory. More to the point, as I have argued and as Heritage documents, President Obama himself has defunded purportedly “mandatory” elements of Obamacare — in the absence of any legislative authority whatsoever. In the Beltway’s upside-down world, the House of Representatives is apparently the only part of government prohibited from cutting spending.

There are, moreover, higher principles involved here — particularly if Republicans are in favor of restoring constitutional order, as they proclaim. There is nothing in the Constitution about “mandatory” spending — a progressive contrivance to insulate the welfare state from adult decisions about living within one’s means. As argued here before, social-welfare policy is a matter for the states. Its management is among what Madison described as “the powers reserved to the several States [that] extend to all the objects, which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties and properties of the people; and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.” Health-care regulation is plainly not among the “external objects,” such as foreign relations and national defense, that the federal government was created to manage. Furthermore, federal entitlement programs are rationalized by a contorted construction of the Constitution’s General Welfare Clause — one the Framers would not have recognized.

Nevertheless, in the current controversy, conservatives are not calling for the dismantling of the welfare state or even the repeal of Obamacare. Everyone recognizes that the latter would require an act of Congress. We are talking about the narrow Republican commitment to restore originalist constitutional principles to the legislative process. The legislation at issue is a continuing resolution for funding the government, not expunging Obamacare. Refusing to include Obamacare in that funding would not remove Obamacare’s statutory validity. It is black-letter law that a prior Congress cannot bind the present Congress, and a statute cannot supersede the Constitution. Prior law’s designation of Obamacare spending as “mandatory” cannot compel the current Congress to fund it as part of continuing-resolution legislation, nor does it alter the Constitution’s command that all spending in that continuing resolution must originate in the House.