Discussion: White House Uses Scalia's 2012 Obamacare Dissent Against Him

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Discussion for article #232500

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This is good to do. It is clear that if SCOTUS. Uphold King v Burwell, it is not doing so on the merits but because they are trying to repeal Obamacare from the bench. This is teliing the fascists that we know you are thinking about it. Not clear if they have any counter attack other than to attck the judges reputation as honest jurors, but i dont think scalia thomas alito care.

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They haven’t cared since at least Bush v. Gore. This is an ad hominem attack in its original meaning: an attack using a person’s stated beliefs against him.

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No, an ad hominem argument is one that criticizes the person or his character instead of his claims and is generally a fallacy. Using someone’s beliefs against him is simply a way of showing his position is inconsistent and is pretty standard practice.

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True, true, this is all true. And it’s true that everybody in Congress at the time, and everybody watching what was happening there, knew that subsidies were intended for people using the federal exchanges.

But none of this matters if five justices want to take this opportunity to destroy the ACA. They don’t really give a damn what happens in the outside world, but they do want to shrink the Federal government.

The greatest hope for the country doesn’t rest in a recitation of facts about what people said back when. To save the ACA, we need all hospitals and drug companies and doctors and everybody else dependent on having more patients to shout out now, to either penetrate the cone around SCOTUS, or to convince Congress to quickly pass a technical “fix” if SCOTUS kills the subsidies.

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Expect no consistency from the right wing stooges on the court.

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Agree. They have their agenda and the law, what’s right, what’s fair be damned.
Those “conservatives” on the court are simply nasty, bigoted old men.

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Legal arguments don’t matter. What they previously said doesn’t matter. What the intention was is irrelevant. They all know how they will vote. Why have the charade of “listening” to arguments?

If anyone ever deserved impeachment, Thomas, Scalia, and Alito do. Lifetime appointments should end. Hell, the Supreme Court is so dysfunctional it should end.

Legal questions could be fed into a computer loaded with the text of the Constitution and previous decisions. At least it would result in objectivity.

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I’m pretty sure “textualist” in the context of Scalia means: “I just go with the result I want and totally BS the logic behind it. It doesn’t matter if I’m totally contradicting myself, making sh!t up, or whether I’m twisting the law/ruling into a pretzel in order to do so. I don’t have to even pretend to be consistent around here anymore.”

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It doesn’t matter because the corrupted court will vote 5-4 to kill the subsidies.

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I agree. It’s time for 18 year term limits for Federal judges. After 18 years they should be reappointed/reconfirmed or dismissed.

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The SCOTUS would rather kill ACA and deprive millions of American health insurance than give up on their RW conservatism principles that are out of align with common decency and principles of the American people.

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Better get to work on the necessary constitutional amendment.

Good luck getting it passed.

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If Adler is right (and he is) that Scalia is a “textualist,” then “Scalia the Textualist” has already interpreted the ACA text the same way the Administration does. So, maybe I’m missing something, but I’m a little mystified as to why Adler has tried to use that argument to rebut the Administration on this point, as even Scalia has written that textual interpretation requires you to put every word and sentence in the context of what the entire statute is trying to achieve. . But, I’m even more mystified as to why the Administration isn’t putting on a pre-argument “full court press” on the Court. After all, every one of the Justices who votes to deny health insurance subsidies to millions of Americans gets taxpayer subsidized health insurance himself. I think that’s an argument most Americans would easily understand.

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That’s the modern definition, which has pretty much taken over the meaning in the current vernacular. However, as a technical term in logic, both meanings persist:

argumentum ad hominem
/ˌɑːɡjʊˈmɛntʊm æd ˈhɒmɪˌnɛm/
noun (logic)

  1. fallacious argument that attacks not an opponent’s beliefs but his motives or character
  2. argument that shows an opponent’s statement to be inconsistent with his other beliefs
  3. an instance of either of these
    <a href-“http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/argumentum+ad+hominem”>http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/argumentum+ad+hominem

Type 1 (the “abusive” ad hominem) is the modern concept of the term. Type 2 (the “circumstantial” ad hominem), also known as argumentum ex concessis or “argument from (prior) commitment”, goes back to the root.

There are two views of the ad hominem argument found in the textbooks and other traditional treatments of this argument, the Lockean or ex concessis view and the view of ad hominem as personal attack.
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The expression argumentum ad hominem, an expression widely used in both logic and common speech, is ambiguous. The conventional meaning it has in common speech is the use of personal attack by one party in a dialogue to attempt to refute the argument of another party.
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Another meaning of the expression argumentum ad hominem has become lodged into the logical tradition. In this sense, an ad hominem argument is taken to mean an argument by one party in a dialogue based on the commitments or previous concessions of the other party. This form of argument, called ‘argument from commitment’ in modern argumentation theory, does not necessarily require a personal attack by the respondent. This form of argument is used by one party to infer that the other is committed to a certain proposition, based on what the other has said or done in the past.
– D. N. Walton, “Argumentation Schemes and Historical Origins of
the Circumstantial Ad Hominem Argument,” Argumentation 18 (2004): 359–368.

Granted while some logicians say the circumstantial ad hominem goes back to Arisitotle, others say it only began with Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding:

Any consideration of how the ad hominem evolved as an identifiable type of argument must start with the passage in Locke’s Essay, quoted by Hamblin (1970, pp. 159–160), where Locke defined ad hominem the argument used when one party ‘presses’ another with ‘consequences drawn from his own principles or concessions.’ Hamblin (1970, pp. 160–174) quoted Locke’s remark (1690) that ‘to press a man with consequences drawn from his own principles or concessions’ is a form of argument ‘already known under the name argumentum ad hominem’.
– ibid., p.363.

You need to expand your knowledge base.

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Non-voters do not live in a vacuum. In fact, a substantial number of them live with their parents in a state of prolonged adolescence. That’s fine, provided their long-suffering parents (many of whom actually are TeaBaggers voting for their own enslavement) can foot the bill.

We’ll see, I guess, if the demise of the ACA will penetrate the stupor of the TeaBagg parents, along with their clueless offspring.

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Reality, legal precedent and logic mean very little to these
right wing justices.  They have a different
agenda

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It’s worth pointing out that lifetime appointments to the SCOTUS are tradition not Constitutional.

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You could have stopped typing with “That’s the modern definition, which has pretty much taken over the meaning in the current vernacular.”, which essentially confirmed Matthew’s point.

The rest of your comment is little more than filibustering or to be more accurate “filiblustering”; including the condescending sentence at the end.

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And YOU need to pull that giant rod out from your alimentary canal. What you fail to acknowledge is that ad hominem reasoning is ONLY “fallacious” when or to the extent that it seeks to invoke the assumed irrelevancy of the debater’s personally particular circumstances or history. That is: it is NOT fallacious in the least for me to invoke inconsistencies between what you now say and what you said earlier on the same topic or in analogous circumstances.

It doesn’t remotely approach rocket surgery.