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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.
In correct. In other words. The law was clearly drafted with a given intent that the plaintifs want the court to ignore, however intent of the law is an important part of the SCOTUS's interpretation of all laws.
Not one Congressman has read the law in full — not before it was passed, not after. It is too long and too complicated.
Though it is acceptable for courts to turn to legislative intent sometimes, that's specifically reserved to cases, where the laws language is unclear.
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. Whether that was the intent of the law-makers or not is irrelevant. The court's decision is wrong.
What is written is not what is meant by intent, what is meant by intent is what the law was meant to accomplish. In this case if you remove all context from those few lines you can make it look like the intent was not to provide subsidies to these states (if you ignore that the word state has dual meaning in legislation), however when you look at the full bill, or heavens forbid, talk to the drafters of the law, you can see that the intent was to provide the credits either way.
When you cant win, ad hominem.
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."
If SCOTUS can twist these words what stops them from twisting ANY words?
Except that if "State", only means individual states, then many of the constitutional amendments - including the second - fall apart on the federal level.
That's why in laws (especially 2400 page monstrosities like this one) they have sections on Definitions to specifically say whether "State" means "50 States", "50 States + US Territories like Puerto Rico", or "50 States + Territories + District of Columbia", etc.
In this case, the law was originally drafted to deal with State-level exchanges. A Federal exchange was an afterthought one they didn't expect/hope would be used. (And according to Gruber, was intentionally left out of this clause.) Whatever the case, the courts should be rewriting when it's a clear cut, cut-and-dried case of an error. As long as there's a plausible rationale for why the text is the way it is ("To discourage States from relying on the Federal exchange, at the cost of the Federal funding that we'd otherwise be giving to the citizens of that State to help with the insurance fee we're forcing them to pay"), we should be relying on the text.
Typos can indeed lead to ludicrous conclusions that can be corrected judicially. This was not one of them.
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It's a basic principle of statutory interpretation that legislatures define laws by their written text. If the text is vague, you can fill in the blanks by guessing at the intent, but if the text is clear, the text is the meaning of the statute. Since legislation is usually the product of intense horse trading, statutes rarely have any sort of coherent intent and they are often full of contradictions.
That being said, that wasn't the case here. The statute was plainly worded and the whole "only states that set up exhcanges get subsidies" mechanism was bragged about for the first two years after it was signed into law. They only changed their tune when they realized that the structure collapsed if you take away the subsidies (which also control the mandates, etc).
Bascially, the administration asked for Chevron deference, which means "the statute is so vague, we have no idea what it means, so the IRS can make a rule that is directly the opposite of the text". Even this was a stretch.
The supreme court turned around and rewrote the statute for them, saying "the statute isn't vague, it means exactly the opposite of what it says, there's no need for the IRS to even do anything or pretend to need Chevron deference."
Viewing these words as a mistake is the simplest interpretation of the law. The other option is to re-interpret lots of other sections, and change the law to be at odds with how the people writing it meant for it to be interpreted.
The writers of the law clearly wanted to establish state exchanges for any state that wanted them, and a federal exchange for any state that didn't want to roll its own, and that all of these exchanges do the same thing. This might not be apparent in that little snippet, but it's very much apparent in the text of the law itself.
It's not as though the SCOTUS majority is pulling meaning out of nowhere for just this passage. Quite the contrary, they'd have had to re-interpret a lot of text to infer that the law was written so as to exclude subsidies for the federal exchange.
Bullshit! Words need to have meanings and laws need to have concrete meanings to whatever degree is possible. Its the whole reasons things are struck down all the time as 'void for vagueness.'
If congress is allowed to retroactively decide what they intended, never mind what the wrote than we might has well go back to a monarchy and whatever the King thinks today goes. A system of laws is absolutely useless when anything can mean whatever government wants it mean. You and I just suffered a blow to any real protection any real possibility of justice. This is just one more example of turning the rule of law into a bad joke. The SCOTUS, POTUS, and Congress should be ashamed of themselves.
There is plenty of evidence in the form of Gruber to suggest that congress did indeed intend to write what they wrote to cajole states into compliance. Sates called their bluff and now congress gets a pass.
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Except there's a definitions section to the law that defines the State as "one of the 50 states". But go ahead. Ignore that.