Conservatives didn't draft a piss poor bill, so poorly written that it needs to go to SCOTUS to be interpreted.Originally Posted by upsideguy
Conservatives didn't draft a piss poor bill, so poorly written that it needs to go to SCOTUS to be interpreted.
Say what you will about his decisions, but he is a human being and he didn't want the legacy of his court to be the one that shot down Obamacare for millions of people. I think any Chief Justice would feel and rule the same way.
But it's the GOP with control of the House and Senate. It's their obligation to govern and fix the law if they see problems, not point fingers.
I didn't realize that was basically the entire article. Typical drivel from NRO. Anyone intellectually honest recognizes that at the very least the competing sides both had compelling legal precedent to point to, which of course rules out hacks at NRO....
You're much more ideologically equipped to be the bleeding heart supporter of the poor, hard done by Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court. It is not the job of a Supreme Court Justice, and certainly not the job of the Chief Justice of the court, to play politics with the law. There are many issues that come before a court that are contentious and often that even a majority of the public support or oppose. Are you suggesting that the Supreme Court should rule via public opinion polling?
Chief Justice Roberts has been a disgrace, in my view, in that he has in effect practiced the equivalent of jury nullification. He has taken his position and substituted his own personal viewpoint on the validity of law for an actual interpretation of the law as written.
A Canadian conservative is one who believes in limited government and that the government should stay out of our wallets and out of our bedrooms.
But the problem is the ACA itself contemplated that states would not establish their own exchanges, and provided that in those cases the Feds would do so on their behalf. It's a stretch at best that the law intended for the Feds to establish exchanges that WOULD FAIL, and that didn't qualify for the central feature of the ACA which was subsidies for lower income individuals.
And it's more of a stretch that this feature - failure of the subsidy in states with Fed exchanges - was so well hidden that it took months and some eagle eyed citizen to catch. None of the states knew it when they decided whether or not to establish exchanges. If the Congress intended such a draconian result to attach to the decision to let the Feds operate the exchange, a plausible interpretation is that they would have clearly outlined such a result instead of hinging it on splitting hairs between "by a state" versus "by the Feds on behalf of the state". That they did not is strong evidence that the subsidy failure for those states was a drafting error and not an intended result. And when faced with the failure of a law based on a drafting error the SC is required to read the law and its intent as a whole and sustain the law.
Last edited by JasperL; 06-25-15 at 11:59 AM.
Everyone that was in congress that has spoken on the matter has insisted that the intent of the law was that subsidies would also apply to the federal exchange. That makes a huge difference between this and some instance where someone just wanted to change the definition of what a "state" is.
**Thirty Minutes Later**
It's their obligation to work on legislation as they see fit. I prefer Republicans not clean up the mess Democrats made. It's their plan, they passed it without a single Republican vote, in the dead of night, during the Holidays. Let them clean up their mess. If people are unsatisfied, let them remember who was responsible.
Seems very fair to me.
Then the remedy is legislative change.
The ultimate point of the Supreme Court is to decide on the merit of a challenge based the case made vs. the wording of the law in question and that case made. It is not the purpose of the Supreme Court to determine what should happen when the government *thinks* something should have happened according to legislative plan, but did not for whatever reason.
ACA as written is very explicit in what tax credits and subsidies are to be applied to, and in seven separate parts of ACA it explicitly says "Exchange established by the State." What ACA does *not* say about tax credits and subsidies is an exchange established by the State or the Secretary of Health and Human Services.
The dissenting opinion is right, the Federal argument should have failed forcing Congressional remedy for the mistake made.
"Every time something really bad happens, people cry out for safety, and the government answers by taking rights away from good people." - Penn Jillette.
Didn't realize they had a veto proof majority.
" If no one among us is capable of governing himself, then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else ? "
Ronald Reagan
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