I’m actually not that surprised at the outcome. The surprising thing was that the Supreme Court ever took this case in the first place.
But the US Supreme Court upheld the challenge to Obamacare. The opinion is here.
In layman’s terms, the issue surrounded some (arguably) vague language in the Affordable Care Act relating to the federal government providing financial assistance to people who get Obamacare through their state exchange. If you interpret the language one way, the federal government cannot provide financial assistance. If you interpret it the way Congress intended it, then the federal government can provide financial assistance. Without the federal government assistance, however, health insurance will become far too expensive for millions of people who buy it through their state exchange, and so they won’t buy it. (In North Carolina, it would increase healthcare costs by over $300 per month). In effect, it would end Obamacare.
So the question was actually quite simple…. did Congress intend to write a healthcare law that wouldn’t work?
Chief Justice Roberts wrote the opinion and the short answer to that question is….
Chief Justice Roberts did note that the ACA was a badly written piece of legislation. (There are, he notes, three separate Section 1563s).
Scalia’s dissent is pure Scalia. It refers to “interpretive jiggery-pokery” and calls the majority opinion “pure applesauce”.
Elsewhere, he writes: “Impossible possibility, thy name is an opinion on the Affordable Care Act!”
He writes that the court “rewrites the law to make tax credits available everywhere… We should start calling this law SCOTUScare.” (that’s the first time “SCOTUS” has ever been used in a SCOTUS opinion).
He says: “Under all the usual rules of interpretation, in short, the Government should lose this case. But normal rules of interpretation seem always to yield to the overriding principle of the present Court: The Affordable Care Act must be saved.”
And similarly: “[T]he cases will publish forever the discouraging truth that the Supreme Court of the United States favors some laws over others, and is prepared to do whatever it takes to uphold and assist its favorites.”
Talk about projection. Scalia is the one with the obvious agenda and “favorites”. That last comment is a pretty harsh attack on his colleagues, including the Chief Justice.
We should remember that Scalia didn’t give a rat’s ass about the clear language OR the legislative intent of the Voting Rights Act when he and his conservative colleagues gutted it, deciding unilaterally that it didn’t apply to today’s world, now that there isn’t racism any longer.
Roberts, by the way, took Scalia’s own dissent from the last major Obamacare case, and used it against Scalia. It was buried in a footnote and amounted to a small dart lobbed Scalia’s way. To defend making the subsidies available to consumers everywhere, Roberts cited a line the dissent to the 2012 decision in favor of Obamacare, in which Scalia said, “Without the federal subsidies . . . the exchanges would not operate as Congress intended and may not operate at all.”
Roberts used the line to argue that it “is implausible that Congress meant the Act to operate” in a manner to limit the subsidies only to those states with state-operated exchanges, as the challengers in King v. Burwell argued.
Other reax below the fold
The South shall rise again! https://t.co/IEzAumSFaM — Billmon (@billmon1) June 25, 2015
Seems that conservative pundits are sharpening the knives for Roberts. At National Review’s The Corner, Quin Hilyer had this to say about the Chief Justice:
With today’s Obamacare decision, John Roberts confirms that he has completely jettisoned all pretense of textualism. He is a results-oriented judge, period, ruling on big cases based on what he thinks the policy result should be or what the political stakes are for the court itself. He is a disgrace. That is all.
The headline was: “Chief Justice Roberts Has Officially Gone Native in Washington.” This theme of personal, deliberate betrayal by Roberts was ratcheted up a few notches at Red State by frequent diarist Leon Wolf, who after an extensive and unintentionally hilarious series of assertions that not one person who ever went to law school could honestly agree with the majority opinion, delivered this anathema:
One wonders how many decades of electing Republicans to the Presidency are needed before the Supreme Court finds itself reformed in all the many ways we are continually promised by Republican candidates. One further wonders how long we will continue deluding ourselves into believing that it will ever actually happen.
More importantly, John Roberts has now been fully exposed for what he is – a craven, unprincipled hack, determined to protect the interests of his own power and his institution’s prestige over and above the interests of doing his job well and honestly. In other words, he’s basically the Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) of the Supreme Court.
Yeah. Boo-hoo. And untrue. Roberts is just as conservative as ever. He’s just not an ideologue..
At the Federalist, Ben Domenech took the “heightening the contradictions” approach:
[T]his SCOTUScare ruling presents an accurate reflection of the reality in Washington: that American politics no longer has real checks and balances. The rules no longer apply. Words mean whatever we say they mean at the time that we say them, neither more nor less. Welcome to the Cartman presidency, where the executive does whatever he wants, up to and including making IRS bureaucrats decide a multi-billion dollar issue. Think the text means exactly what it says? Judicial fiat says lol, jk.
In the context of a nation governed by men and not laws, arguments from the establishment about process, restraint, and the normal give and take of what used to be the American political system for most of the Twentieth Century are going to become weaker and weaker. For the faction that demands dramatic change, the gradualist approach favored by Republican leaders who yearn for the status quo politics of the before time – before the bailouts, before Obama, before the Tea Party – is revealed as a myth.
And this theory is being floated….
To be honest, I don’t what the talking point will be for the GOP when it comes to actual healthcare. Now, as a result of the decision, millions of people will get to keep their healthcare. How do you spin that into a bad thing? What do you promise to do about it?
The truth is, I think most GOP politicians are relieved. Despite all their argle-bargle, they won’t have to actually come up with a healthcare plan.