Following the Supreme Court ruling on King vs. Burwell, Americans once again found themselves watching the SCOTUS bench pick and choose which parts of U.S. law will be enforced, based on their personal political beliefs.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. has saved Obamacare for a second time, writing the majority opinion Thursday that upheld the health law’s key provision of paying tax subsidies to customers in all states, saying that Congress couldn’t have intended to pick and choose among the states.
The law says subsidies should be paid to customers of exchanges “established by the state,” but the chief justice, writing in the 6-3 ruling, said even states that don’t establish an exchange and rely instead on the federal marketplace can receive subsidies.
He said the intent of lawmakers couldn’t have been to pick and choose, because that would destroy the fundamental economics of Obamacare — which couldn’t have been the intention of those who wrote the law.
Of course not…. If I remember correctly, the intention of those who wrote the law was to count on the “stupidity of the American people” to not notice that the individual mandate was a tax. Isn’t that right, Jonathan Gruber?
… Justice Scalia, the senior member of the court, penned the dissent for himself, Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Justice Clarence Thomas, writing what under the majority ruling “words no longer have meaning” because Chief Justice Roberts ignored the plain language of the law.
“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,” Justice Scalia chided his younger colleague.
This decision strikes a tragic blow, not just to the ObamaCare repeal movement, but to the rule of law itself.
By upholding the provision, the Supreme Court is sending a message to the IRS that if they don’t like the laws the way they are written, they can enforce whatever version of the law they want. That’s right- a bunch of unelected, unknown bureaucrats can make changes to U.S. law and hope nobody can notice. And even if people DO notice, the Supreme Court has their back.
