For the 27th time, Barack Obama has issued a unilateral delay of an ObamaCare provision, this time the one requiring businesses with 50-99 full-time workers to offer health benefits. Obama had already delayed that mandate until 2015, but now it’s not effective until 2016. Furthermore, businesses with more than 100 employees need not cover 100% of employees, but rather only 70% of workers by 2015 and 95% in 2016 and after.

Or, you know, whenever. The Obama Treasury Department wrote, “As these limited transition rules take effect, we will consider whether it is necessary to further extend any of them beyond 2015.” Whatever politically benefits Democrats. Republicans certainly can’t challenge it or they would appear to support the mandate.

Last week’s CBO report showed that ObamaCare is costing the economy big time, but the White House insisted that it’s liberating workers. “Well, which is it?” asks The Wall Street Journal. “Either ObamaCare is ushering in a worker’s paradise, in which case by the White House’s own logic exempting businesses from its ministrations is harming employees. Or else the mandate really is leading business to cut back on hiring, hours and shifting workers to part-time as the evidence in the real economy suggests.”

For the Obama administration, it’s both. While assuring low-info voters that ObamaCare enables people to “make a decision about how they will work, and if they will work,” the White House can also give businesses a reprieve until after the mid-term election. The previous delay put businesses in the position of accounting for the mandate right before the election and that simply wouldn’t do. But the effect of yet another delay and the prospect of who knows how many others is that businesses can’t plan for the law. Therefore, the economy will remain stagnant.

As an aside, the timing of this delay is especially interesting given that House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) just said immigration reform was unlikely because Republicans don’t trust Obama to enforce the law. The president’s doubling down on ObamaCare should completely take immigration off the table.

Speaking of timing, it’s incredibly ironic that, on a visit to Thomas Jefferson’s home with French President Francois Hollande, Obama reportedly said, “[A]s a president, I can do whatever I want.” Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence, didn’t have kind things to say about Obama’s brand of tyranny. “The tree of liberty,” wrote Jefferson, “must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure.”