No taxation without legislation

Nor, says Cato's Michael Cannon, with misrepresentation of the legislation we actually have, So the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has subpoenaed documents their investigators have seen at IRS and Treasury;

The federal government has established Exchanges within those states [that declined to set up their own], but the PPACA says the government can implement the law’s Exchange subsidies, employer mandate, and (to a large extent) its individual mandate only “through an Exchange established by the State.” Nevertheless, the IRS issued a regulation implementing those taxes and expenditures in states with federal Exchanges anyway. That regulation that is being challenged as illegal by taxpayers, employers, school districts, and states, who claim the IRS is taxing them without congressional authorization.

The subpoenaed documents could have a big impact on those cases [Halbig and King].... the Treasury Department and the IRS have refused to make the subpoenaed documents public. ....

According to the investigators’ account of those documents and interviews, in March 2011, IRS officials read a news article about how ObamaCare opponents were considering a constitutional challenge based on the fact that the PPACA offers subsidies only in states that establish Exchanges. Up until that point, the IRS’s draft regulations included the statutory requirement that subsidy recipients enroll in coverage through an Exchange “established by the State.” (The employer and individual mandates are tied to the availability of the subsidies.) That statutory requirement disappeared from the draft regulations at the same time IRS officials learned that opponents might challenge that feature of the law in court.

Our bold in the above.