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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.
In other words, the majority's decision was based not on the law itself, but on its effects and/or would-be effects.
Yes. In the real world SCOTUS looks closely at what impact their decision will have. "not based on the law itself" is a ridiculous criticism--they are being *asked* what the law is, and part of deciding what the law is when there is any ambiguity or potentially counterintuitive result is to figure out what are the consequences if the law is way X vs. way Y.
That's why SCOTUS often considers "administrability" when they are making decisions. It's a fundamental part of how the court operates. Would you rather they kill people Congress didn't intend to kill or that they say "this is a typo and in the context of what you are doing, it's pretty damn clear you would have intended this to mean X if you had bothered to read the law you wrote."
There is zero ambiguity here in terms of what Congress intended; it's clear that a law was poorly drafted. This is a not a maybe-they-meant-Y situation, this is a "hey, they accidentally used a sentence that probably says Y."
That was not the case here — as written, the law clearly only allows subsidies for residents of those states, that have set up "health exchanges" of their own.
That's simply not true. There is ONE SINGLE CLAUSE TAKEN IN ISOLATION WHICH SAYS "ESTABLISHED BY THE STATE", but there are other clauses which clearly spell out in more detail the requirements of the exchanges and the relationship between state and federal, but the nutjob right-wing desperadoes who have failed in every other attempt to overturn ACA chose to pin their hopes on SCOTUS taking a single clause out of context...
No, it is a twisted interpretation of the law. "The state" is used seven times in the law and this is the only instance where the court has decided it must mean the sate and the federal government.
It's a basic principle of statutory interpretation that legislatures define laws by their written text.
LMFTY: It's one basic principle in English Jurisprudence, known in legal circles as "the plain meaning rule". The other two are: "the golden rule" and "the mischief rule".
The golden rule allows a judge to depart from a word's normal meaning in order to avoid an absurd result.
The mischief rule sets the court to determine the "mischief and defect" that the statute in question has set out to remedy, and what ruling would effectively implement this remedy.
When America was founded those three principles were firmly in place. Over the years the courts and the laws themselves have been moving away from that tradition, creating the (in)famous loopholes that are the bread and butter of corporate law practice.