Congress fraudulently registered as a small business, watchdog says


In a lawsuit filed with the District of Columbia Court of Appeals on Monday, Judicial Watch alleges that Congress is illegally spending millions of Washington, D.C.'s municipal tax dollars on its own health care.
This is accomplished, the nonprofit watchdog says, by having more than 12,000 congressional staff and their dependents acquire health care through the District's Small Business Exchange, which local law explicitly limits to organizations with 50 employees or fewer. "Congress obviously has far more than 50 employees," Judicial Watch dryly notes. Indeed, the thousands of staffers and their families taking advantage of the ObamaCare market "represent an astonishing 86 percent of the Small Business Exchange's total enrollment."
A Judicial Watch FOIA request previously revealed that the House and Senate applications to the Small Business Exchange described both as "state/local government" employing just 45 full-time staff per chamber. The current appeal follows dismissal of the original case earlier this year after the D.C. government said Congress could override its laws.
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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.
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