Discussion for article #232383
a minority coalition should form and try to vote steny hoyer out of office. hoyer has done nothing for the minority communities as in formulating a plan to bringing these communities into the economic distribution chain. however hoyer is great at supporting the 1%
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Steeney the Weeney once again hands the Republicans a nail to put in the ACA’s coffin which is par for the course for this incompetent Blue Dog.
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One of the things I most hate about the Beltway MSM is the way a single sentence will be pulled out of context of a strong statement about “x” and hyped as an admission of “not x” among gleeful squeals of “Gaffe! Gaffe! Gaffe! Hahaha a politician failed to have every single sentence of what he was going to say nailed down in advance so pefectly that we couldn’t pluck a single sentence out of context and call it an admission of the opposite of what he said!”
Yes, fair to say I loathe that with a passion that burns with magnesium flair intensity and think it is a thing that will get at least a dozen pages in the future book called “The Decline and Fall of the American Republic.” That that exact thing is one of the big things that drove me away from the MSM and into the arms of alternative media.
And so, now. Alas.
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Absolutely. But pols need to learn and can’t go off the cuff like that.
Top House Dem: It is clear that the intent and the understanding of the US Congress Majority was that subsidies would be available to all people with limited means and income who are unable to pay for health insurance.
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I don’t blame Hoyer. I blame TPM. According to the article, Hoyer says that the Supreme Court would “defy logic” if it rules against the ACA.
TPM is trying to gotcha-ize what the vast majority of people (those not trying to profit off of “clicks”) would consider a strong defense of ACA subsidies.
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Fucking idiot. Guess which part of this quote Scalia and Alito are going to use out of context. Guess.
Meh, it is clear enough in terms of legal legislative jargen. There would be no need to redefine each word every time it is used. I find legislative language to be very vague anyway but that has always been something of the intent. So the agencies have some leeway.
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No, sorry, but I heartily disagree. That’s pure victim blaming (a popular Democratic pastime, I’ll grant you). Read what he said. Read the one line in the context of what he said. What he said was true. All of it. The acknowledgement of the simple truth that a large complex piece of legislation contains an imperfectly drafted sentence that cannot and should not be construed in isolation from the the way the entire act is intended to work should not be treated as a “mistake” by our side.
I reject, and indeed, reject and denounce, the idea that a politician speaking like an intelligent adult human being conveying real ideas, touched with even the slightest hint of moral or factual complexity, to other adult human beings is blameworthy. The inability of politicians to do that without an MSM Asshat Banality Orgy breaking out is the problem. The insistence that our politicians must protect themselves from the Asshattery by being Disney animatronic entertainment 'bots pre-programmed with plastic one-dimensional platitudes and focus-group tested phrasing from which they may never deviate is the problem. The forces driving that insistence are deadly to democracy. Blaming our politicians for not being those 'bots perpetuates the problem and makes us complicit in it.
The problem here is, entirely and completely, the degeneracy of our millionaire pundit MSM media culture and, worse still, the urge of young up and comers to conform to the norms of that culture in the hopes of someday themselves becoming part of the millionaire punditocracy. I can’t stop the degenerate Dowdified corporate MSM from being a sad, sorry shadow of the institution that exposed the lies behind the Vietnam War and stood up to the growing threat to the Constitution of the Nixon Administration. The rot goes too deep. The only hope is that it will die out as a result of technological and generational change. But I will damn well do what little I can, even if it’s a pointless shriek in the comments, to keep that rot from metastasizing into new media.
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Now Steny, you were in on the 11 months of debate and construction of the Bill…why did you not speak up then?
could it be gutless second guessing!
Look closely behind the curtain . . .
The insurance company’s bean counters are busily crunching numbers to see how much money they’ll lose if the court rules in favor of the plaintiffs and those in the states without subsidies cannot afford an insurance policy without the subsidy.
Will the insurance lobby thumb their nose at the consumers that will direct taxpayer subsidies to help cover the cost come in to the tune of nearly $500 billion over the next ten years?
~OGD~
Who are we kidding. Hoyer is right. The language isn’t as clear as it should be. Most big pieces of legislation have similar ambiguities or poor turns of phrase. In the old days the Congress would pass corrective legislation to solve the problem… If Congress didn’t act the courts could be counted on to figure out what the Congress meant. These days, just try getting Congress to act responsibly. As to the courts, the Supreme Court showed it is nothing more than an extension of Republican party elites back in 2000. It hasn’t done much since to prove otherwise since.
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Email Josh; I’m going to, as should anyone else who agrees with you, especially the long-timers and most especially any Prime members. You surely know how many of us agree with you on the corruption of our media and on its key role in the country’s destructive trajectory over the last few decades (I think they’re more culpable than the GOP, who after all will do what they do; it was journalists’ job to explain what they were doing). We all came to sources like TPM out of the same disgust, and hope, as you. Email Josh. (And please keep shrieking in the comments.)
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True enough. Though it’s important to note that the law as a whole really leaves no doubt. Here’s a terrific analysis, using only the text of the law itself (and quoting Scalia on what textualism actually is, a nice touch):
The only question is whether Scalia and the other SCOTUScons will value intellectual integrity (and in Roberts’ case, his legacy) over ideology and bald partisanship. I wish I felt confident that they would. But every defender of the ACA should have this argument in their arsenal.
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Not Steny’s biggest fan, but the quote in context and especially with the added clarification make plain that the headline and framing of this piece are utter BS. Not the first time this author has been guilty of that; I can’t cite other examples offhand, but it’s happened often enough for me to notice, and approach his articles with skepticism until I see for myself what the real story is.
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Yup; meanwhile, given the low comment total (a few of which I wish Josh would read), I’d bet many readers saw the headline and thought, “Well, even Steny thinks there’s a valid case here,” and didn’t bother to read further and discover how irresponsibly misleading the headline is. @Josh_M, please, please don’t let this keep happening.
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What’s insidious is the way the headline plays to preconceptions. Sure, Hoyer’s earned his reputation; that doesn’t make this twisting of his words any more acceptable.
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Nothing to see here.
Move on.
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Oh for fuck’s sake. It doesn’t even need context. Of course it’s not as clear as it should be. If it was, there wouldn’t be even the slightest grounds for this stupid case. This isn’t a “candid admission”, it’s a statement of fact. Anybody who thinks Scalia et al. will latch on to this, as if they couldn’t find an excuse to rule against the law any other way, is a fucking idiot (especially given Gruber’s repeated asshattery).
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