- The Supreme Court today handed the Obama administration a major victory on health care, ruling 6-3 that nationwide subsidies called for in the Affordable Care Act are legal.
"Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them," the court's majority said in the opinion, which was written by Chief Justice John Roberts. But they acknowledged that "petitioners' arguments about the plain meaning ... are strong."
Scalia's sour grapes:Words no longer have meaning if an exchange that is not established by a state is “established by the State.” It is hard to come up with a clearer way to limit tax credits to state exchanges than to use the words “established by the State.” And it is hard to come up with a reason to include the words “by the State” other than the purpose of limiting credits to state Exchanges. … 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.
The GOP candidates must be jumping for joy right now. The last thing they wanted was for victory. Can you imagine the turmoil in their poor red states as people lost coverage? Can you imagine them actually having to put forth specific solutions? This gives them a "bad guy" to continue to rail against.
Roberts has surprised me multiple times. The 2016 GOP presidential candidate pool looks like a funeral after a wealthy relative is dead. Out of the woodworks comes hundreds of family-members, hanger-ons, and scoundrels looking to pick over the corpse of our country's middle-class. I feel better for the people still being covered (hey ... look at me being self-interested in my own healthcare) rather than give a wit of anything for GOP candidates. pushes both of my pink poker chips onto the center of the table I'm all in for Bernie.
The commentary I heard said striking down the law at this point had the potential to destroy the insurance industry or at least wreak havoc with an already precarious system. The people who filed this suit may not have wanted to win anymore but that's assuming they aren't fundamentally shitty humans.
Kudos to Roberts for once again playing the role of judge. It's funny to see Scalia talk about "words no longer having meaning" when the whole point of the case was about meaning. I suppose he is a judge of sentences, but not of paragraphs, or collections of them.
The fuck they were. The whole case is based on a semantic technicality from a single line in the bill. The fact that some conservative lawyers poring over a law to find a loophole brought their case to the Supreme Court is embarrassing. At least this should get the republicans and activists to find a better rallying cry against Obama than he tried to help sick people not diebut they acknowledged that "petitioners' arguments about the plain meaning ... are strong."
We'll see how not horrific he is if he decides gay people deserve to be treated with dignity by the government. I'm still kinda scared of him because he's going to be around for a while and that was my initial fear when Bush appointed such a young Chief Justice.