Discussion for article #237878
I think point #3 is the key - Helping people obtain health insurance was the entire point of creating the Affordable Care Act in the first place.
If not that, then why write the law at all?
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This doesn’t leave much credibility to the Republicans’ claim that “We will still repeal and replace if we win the White House in 2016.”
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That claim has always fallen into the same category as Nixon’s secret plan to end the Vietnam War. Pure fiction.
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Roberts’ opinion is eminently reasonable, and serves to further expose the naked partisanship of the radical three. The 6-3 vote makes one wonder whose was the fourth vote to bring this conservative Hail Mary to the court in the first place. What a waste of time and money.
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So Roberts carefully construed the statute and underlying legislative intent, as Anglo-American courts have been doing for centuries. His work stands in glaring contrast to Scalia’s hyper-partisan bomb-throwing under the guise of his hocus-pocus, nonsensical “textual originalism.”
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This is wrong: > " Established by the State’ was ambiguous in the context of the statute as whole. "
The phrase that was key to the challengers’ case was at most ambiguous in the context of the precise text within which it was found. It was the context of the statute considered as a whole that resolved THAT ambiguity.
If it were otherwise, then the majority would have had to struggle with Chevron, which they clearly and unambiguously stated did not apply here, precisely BECAUSE the statute’s overall context left no room for ambiguity.
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Now, Bristol Palin could take advantage of Obamacare to avoid being a single mom a third time.
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“5 Points On Why John Roberts Upheld Obamacare Subsidies:”
1. The economics of health policy mattered to the Supreme Court AHIP, Big Pharma, and the US Chamber of Commerce.
2-5. See 1, above.
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So very true but when will they kill the goose? It’s going to be a long road to single payer.
Thank you, Ms. Sneed, and TPM, for this thoughtful analysis. Bookmarked for future reference.
I would only add that conservatives were only ONLY interested in discrediting the actions of this particular president. That’s the elephant in the room that simply refuses to go away, because so very few want to even take that task on: confronting what has been an absolutely disgusting reaction by one party in this country to the election of someone from the other party to the presidency. I’d add that the media’s mostly complicit role in this attack is the offspring of said elephant, but that might be redundant.
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Roberts absolutely does not want his court, identified with his name, to go down in history as made up of idiots. That alone is the primary reason he has chosen twice now to uphold what is clearly a very good, even though not perfect, law. And, that may be our only protection from further idiocies from the Roberts Court.
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Well written analysis. Another thing that hasn’t been mentioned is that the plaintiffs’ claims to standing were dubious. Scalia is supposed to care deeply about that, since he wrote the Lujan decision in which he said plaintiffs must have a “tangible and particular harm”.
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It was always going to be a long road.
If SCOTUS had knocked it down, it would not happen any more quickly.
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You have the right end of the elephant, but I don’t think describing it as “offspring” is quite accurate…
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This was a good analysis, one of the better ones I have seen on TPM for quite some time. Well done, Ms Sneed.
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Darcy is taking the Leninist position- “The worse the better”. He thinks if we make a bad enough catastrophe, the Republicans who control Congress will see Jesus looming over the Capitol telling them to pass single payer.
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Yes, heightening the contradictions.
Even though:
Two years after the Bush-Cheney regime crashed the nation into a ditch, the country gave the House back to the Republicans;
Several years after Watergate, and five years after Ford pardoned Nixon, the Republicans took back the White House
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And yet…Citizen’s United
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I don’t think Roberts considers Scalia, Thomas and Alito as idiots.
Nor do I think Roberts is wary of overturning law (all the stare decisis questions and his answers, at his confirmation hearing, seemed to be rote, in retrospect).
This is a win, but it never ever should (given the efforts going into this law) have even be challenged.
And I suspect he understands that, and found a legal way to side-step the challenge. That is all.
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