"The Secretary shall determine…"

In the 2,700 some pages that make up the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, you'll see those words a lot, or other words very similar to them. The "Secretary" to which it refers is the Secretary of the Health and Human Services — which for now means Kathleen Sebelius.

The existence of this phrase and similar phrases that appear so frequently throughout ObamaCare serves to highlight one of the most disturbing elements of the law: It codifies government by whim.

There's no better example of this than the issuance of waivers from the obligations imposed by ObamaCare. So far, a total of 1,472 waivers have been issued by the Department of Health and Human Services.

What are the criteria for receiving a waiver?  How are the recipients of these waivers determined?  Well, we just don't know.  The details of the process have never been made public.

But, by whatever criteria they are using to determine who does and does not get an ObamaCare waiver, they found it fit to deny requests from Kansas and Oklahoma:

Health insurers in Kansas and Oklahoma can’t take more than 20 percent of the revenue they collect in premiums for overhead and profit, after the U.S. today denied requests from the states for more generous limits.

The government now has rejected requests by eight states for waivers from a provision of the 2010 health-care overhaul that requires insurance companies to spend at least 80 percent of premium revenue on care, called a medical loss ratio. Seventeen states have asked for an adjustment to the requirement that would allow their insurers to spend less.

On what basis were Kansas and Oklahoma denied and Maine approved for the lower standard it requested? Again, we just don't know, at least not anything more than that this is what "the Secretary determined."

To quote the great words of John Adams, the United States is "a government of laws, and not of men." But the ObamaCare waiver process flies directly in the face of the immutably important design of our republic to be governed by the rule of law.

The ObamaCare waiver process is lawlessness. And it's just another reason why ObamaCare must be repealed.