Well, here's my question, then. If the Obama administration has the power to postpone both the employer mandate and the signup deadlines... What's to stop a Republican president in 2016 from coming in and saying that the employer and the individual mandate are now "postponed" because of implementation difficulty until 2025. It seems to me a Republican president could just move all of the deadlines and effectively repeal the law without having to repeal it.
My understanding: not all that much, from a legal perspective.
However, part of the reason Republicans fought it to the bitter end was likely that once implemented, it'll be very difficult to do politically. The number of "I had health insurance and then it was ripped away!" stories that would result would potentially doom the GOP in subsequent elections.
Well, if your first sentence is correct, then I think we have a major constitutional crisis, because I just described what amounts to an effective repeal of the law.
To extend the idea further: What's to stop the president from changing any deadline or date in any law? Almost every bill passed by Congress contains a line that reads "this act is to be effective on date X". If the president can waive this it will, then we have not only just given him a line-item veto, we have given him a line item repeal.
If the case is that the only impediment to the executive branch unilaterally rewriting laws is politics, then we don't really live in a representative government with checks and balances, we live in a term limited elected dictatorship.
It's my opinion that the current president is firmly in unconstitutional territory.
Basically, plenty of precedent, as the President's responsibility to "faithfully execute" the law can be argued to allow reasonable delays to get it right rather than ruining the thing by sticking to a deadline.
