By Robert Laurie ——Bio and Archives--June 25, 2015
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And that's that. Obama, as usual, gets his way. It was predictable, really. Having abandoned the meaning of words within the English language, the Supreme Court is now free to ignore the actual text of laws and pretend things were written that never were.
As the AP reports:The Supreme Court on Thursday upheld the nationwide tax subsidies under President Barack Obama's health care overhaul, in a ruling that preserves health insurance for millions of Americans.
The justices said in a 6-3 ruling that the subsidies that 8.7 million people currently receive to make insurance affordable do not depend on where they live, under the 2010 health care law. The outcome is the second major victory for Obama in politically charged Supreme Court tests of his most significant domestic achievement. It came the same day the court gave the administration an unexpected victory by preserving a key tool the administration uses to fight housing bias.John Roberts wrote the majority opinion, which stated that the law was upheld because:
Here, the statutory scheme compels the Court to reject petitioners' interpretation because it would destabilize the individual insurance market in any State with a Federal Exchange, and likely create the very "death spirals" that Congress designed the Act to avoid. Under petitioners' reading, the Act would not work in a State with a Federal Exchange. As they see it, one of the Act's three major reforms -- the tax credits -- would not apply. And a second major reform -- the coverage requirement -- would not apply in a meaningful way, because so many individuals would be exempt from the requirement without the tax credits. If petitioners are right, therefore, only one of the Act's three major reforms would apply in States with a Federal Exchange.
The combination of no tax credits and an ineffective coverage requirement could well push a State's individual insurance market into a death spiral. It is implausible that Congress meant the Act to operate in this manner.So forget about what the law was designed to do. None of that matters, since the court isn't concerned with pesky things like, say, "the actual text of the law." Roberts admits that the ACA "contains more than a few examples of "inartful drafting," which we assume is now a synonym for "words you can ignore if you want to grant the federal government unending expansive power." In the dissenting opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia railed against the court's now long-standing habit of re-writing the law to keep it in effect:
Having transformed two major parts of the law, the Court today has turned its attention to a third. The Act that Congress passed makes tax credits available only on an "Exchange established by the State." This Court, however, concludes that this limitation would prevent the rest of the Act from working as well as hoped. So it rewrites the law to make tax credits available everywhere. We should start calling this law SCOTUScare.Democrats are, obviously, celebrating the fact that the country's pre-eminent piece of crony-capitalist legislation will remain intact. Sadly, I suspect they're not the only ones. I believe that the majority of the GOP is just as happy as their alleged opposition. There are now three types of Republicans in Congress.
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