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Supreme Court Upholds Key Obamacare Subsidies
HughPickens.com writes: Retuers reports that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled 6 — 3 in favor of the nationwide availability of tax subsidies that are crucial to the implementation of President Barack Obama's signature healthcare law, handing a major victory to the president. It marked the second time in three years that the high court ruled against a major challenge to the law brought by conservatives seeking to gut it.
"Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them," wrote Chief Justice Roberts in the majority opinion (PDF). He added that nationwide availability of the credits is required to "avoid the type of calamitous result that Congress plainly meant to avoid." The ruling will come as a major relief to Obama as he seeks to ensure that his legacy legislative achievement is implemented effectively and survives political and legal attacks before he leaves office in early 2017. Justice Antonin Scalia took the relatively rare step of reading a summary of his dissenting opinion from the bench. "We really should start calling the law SCOTUScare," said Scalia referencing the court's earlier decision upholding the constitutionality of the law.
"Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them," wrote Chief Justice Roberts in the majority opinion (PDF). He added that nationwide availability of the credits is required to "avoid the type of calamitous result that Congress plainly meant to avoid." The ruling will come as a major relief to Obama as he seeks to ensure that his legacy legislative achievement is implemented effectively and survives political and legal attacks before he leaves office in early 2017. Justice Antonin Scalia took the relatively rare step of reading a summary of his dissenting opinion from the bench. "We really should start calling the law SCOTUScare," said Scalia referencing the court's earlier decision upholding the constitutionality of the law.
The court doesn't need to twist anything. They use week established rules of construction. This is necessary because a single textual document will never convey every nuance.
"We begin with the familiar canon of statutory construction that the starting point for interpreting a statute is the language of the statute itself. Absent a clearly expressed legislative intention to the contrary, that language must ordinarily be regarded as conclusive.:" Consumer Product Safety Commission et al. v. GTE Sylvania, Inc. et al.,447 U.S. 102 (1980).
But the language of the statue has to be understood as a whole.
For example, noscitur a sociis ("a word is known by the company it keeps"):
When a word is ambiguous, its meaning may be determined by reference to the rest of the statute.
That's exactly what the Court did here, and is exactly what most reasonable humans do in establishing the meaning of any word or words.
The text is essentially a hunk of code describing how to execute the law.
The controversial section is a bug.
Do you think the courts should faithfully execute the buggy code, crashing part of the country in the process, or do you think they should fix or ignore the bug and allow the law to execute successfully?
Well, according to one of the law's architects, it was a Feature, not a Bug: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=34rttqLh12U&feature=youtu.be
So to answer your question: Yes.
Hire a Linux system administrator, systems engineer,
Except there's a definitions section to the law that defines the State as "one of the 50 states". But go ahead. Ignore that.
The intent matters just as much as the plain language. Scalia himself has defended that intent matters more than plain language multiple times including pulling out 300 year old dictionaries. The affirming verdict itself quotes Scalia from the last ruling where he completely contradicts what he claims in this dissent. He's an inconsistent little troll, he rules whatever he wants, not what the constitution requires.
Unfortunately, Congress is ceding power to both the Executive and Legislative that can only weaken our rights and liberty. They are becoming less and less relevant.
Uh, unless things have changed around here, Congress IS the Legislative branch of the US Federal government.
"A little misunderstanding? Galileo and the Pope had a little misunderstanding."