Dude, if they're on the I5 Right of Way the are turning in 3D too much. It's got a legendary "grapevine grade" in Kern County.
If they take over a lane, or the median, and build a viaduct a couple stories high, they may be able to beat things like the Grapevine Grade. But then they have to deal with mountains and hills the I5 tunneled through, overpasses, etc. And it's kinda easy to say "we'll take over the median," but I suspect the supports for the huge towers you'd need to make the grapevine grade survivable are gonna be pretty damn expensive.
I'd be a whole lot more sympathetic to their arguments if they didn't boil down to "we costed out the stuff that doesn't cost much, and it doesn't cost much; and clearly nothing else will be relevant because we don;t want it to be relevant."
The book I read is was a Canadian PoliSci textbook. I also read quite a few of the links on the wiki page, have actually talked to actual non-Americans on these issues, read the non-American news when it brings up said issues, etc. There were also those three months I interned in Ottawa. The MP I worked with is still there, but is famous more for having tight underwear then getting legislation passed.
And I never said he couldn't be influenced. I said money wouldn't do the trick. Presidents have more then enough cash to do anything they could conceivably desire, their problem tends to be getting Congress to go along with it. Votes, that vaguely defined "strategic interest" of the United States, their perception of their legacy, etc. are all much more likely to convince a President then cash.
I didn't say they succeeded at getting GOP votes. I said they were trying to get those votes. The State-based Exchanges were one of many ideas added by Democrats in an effort to get GOP votes.
Regardless, I'm not sure why you're calling it "blame" when the only actual result of this controversy was that a bunch of allegedly conservative lawyers got donations from poor schmucks who didn't understand that their legal case was ridiculous.
Ever heard of Scotland? It has worse population density then the US East of the Mississippi. Sweden actually has a population comparable to NYC spread out over a land mass comparable to Cali. Finland's population density is more comparable to Alaska then any other US State. They don't all have record-breaking high-speed rail systems, but they all have rail systems connecting every major City.
Look at it this way: let's say we implement Hi-speed rail in a state with a highly concentrated and relatively large population. Michigan has 9 million people, 58% of them live within two counties of Detroit. Anywhere you're likely to go is within an two hours of Detroit by car, which means means the train has to stop every 20 miles, which makes it very hard to use the high speed, all the construction is somebody's house, so it's very expensive to build, etc. The rail system that makes the least amount of nonsense for the state would probably be circa-1940 speeds from Detroit to Toledo, Gary, and the Wisconsin border, with stops in major cities on the way, and an extensive streetcar system also using 1930s tech.
Let's say, OTOH, you just put a hi-speed rail line across the middle of Montana east-to-west. The low population density makes it incredibly useful because people're likely to be driving for hours and hours across the damn state otherwise. Now it's true there wouldn't necessarily be a whole lot of riders, but if the line actually goes from Minnesota to Seattle...
Rail makes sense when it goes from one major population center to another through ranch land that's cheap to get right-of-way through.
In every press release anyone has ever written on why Hyperloop is better they all say it's cheaper, and they base those cost estimates on the construction costs of gas pipelines. Pipelines are incredibly cheap partly because you can make the damn things do corkscrews if you want. If there's a random hill in the middle of your route you can just go around it, or above it, or use those corkscrews to get to the top of the hill, build a flat piece till you get past the peak, and then corkscrew downward. You don;t need bridges very often, you laugh at the very concept of a "viaduct," and tunnels are things that happen to those silly Civil Engineers.
Rail, OTOH, is incredibly expensive partly because you either have to take a very long way around the hill, go through it, or build a viaduct to make the grade manageable.
One of the reasons the train project that sparked his little Hyperloop brainstorm has costs that keep going up is that the original costs were projected from a map much like the one in the white paper, but when they send their engineers out to survey the route they find all kinds of hills/streams/valleys/dips/etc. that will require those tunnels/viaducts/bridges.
Hyperloop is going over the same terrain at Mach I. So it will require more of that shit because a grade that a train could manage a fraction of it's speed will kill the whole damn train at Mach I. And none of that is in the budget projection.
But planes essentially go straight except for the very beginning and ending of the flight. They don't have to dodge the Mountains of the Southern Coast Range. And they aren't doing it at Mach I.
So you wouldn't be plastered to the back windows, but the side windows would be a wee bit of a problem.
When the damn thing turns. Maglev trains for people are actually slower then the ones for freight because the freight trains don't have to worry about grandma surviving the trip. If they were going straight the whole way that wouldn't be a problem, altho there's some time for slower acceleration and deceleration they the hyperloopies don't seem to add in. But to get from LA to San Fran you can't go straight, you have to go up and down hills, around mountains, over rivers, etc.
A big part of the reason for Hyperloops cost advantage on rail is that Musk insists that a Hyperloop track can be cheaper. He says it would be more analogous to a oil pipeline then a rail track, and have cheaper construction, more abrupt bends, etc., which leads to higher G-Forces; this is a an even bigger problem problem for actual implementation of the idea then it would be for alternatives.
Mark my words: every trial of this will be successful until they put people in it. By the time they've smoothed out the turns, upped construction standards to virtually eliminate accidents, and reduced speed to something grandma can survive it will probably cost more then rail. It's brand-new technology and first generation check is never cheaper then the stuff it's replacing. I suspect there will be significant energy savings, and possibly some speed advantage, due to the fact that a hyperloop operates in a vacuam and there's no wind resistance, but the price advantage ain't gonna last.
On the China border, you're still thinking like a Finn. Large Central and Eastern European states afraid of invasion from the East typically act more aggressively on their western border in hopes that will convince everyone to leave them alone. remember: the Kaiser was worried about Russia, so he invaded Belgium in hopes of knocking out the French. If an anti-Russian alliance was developing there's a real chance they'd deal with it pre-emptively, particularly if they were worried about the Chinese in the East.
After all, you won't be in NATO, which has been weakened anyway (thus sparking the EU Defense Initiative that started this whole scenario), and if knocking you out of that reduces the threat in the West they can cut a deal with the Chinese in the short term and be better prepared for the long term.
Which means your strategic value to the Russians in this scenario wouldn't be geographic. They wouldn't be asking for bases or territory. It would be political. NATO couldn't protect a rich neutral, the ED-Defense Initiative couldn't protect it. Therefore the Balts and Ukrainians better deal with Russia. OTOH it's high risk, because it could also force NATO and the ED-DI together into an anti-Russian alliance. So it would be a very interesting strategic problem. The kind of interesting that you do not want to face in real life.
I understand Putin's position. While it is my contention his actions and political position are evil, that does not mean they are inherently irrational or not understandable. And I think he did quite well prior to this last crisis. But the last crisis is just such a high-risk/low-reward strategy that I suspect he was acting more out of desperation to be seen doing something then his strategic best interests. And I suspect that he under-estimated both the pull of the EU Schengen policy to the Ukrainian people (which is understandable: everybody but Kiev's protesters did this bit) and the ability/desire of Western leaders to keep promises requiring them to screw the Euromaiden protesters.
BTW, Militarized police were not the problem for Occupy Wall Street. Those guys are white. The cops are a huge problem in the black community, particularly the working-class bits where nobody can afford a lawyer, but it's very difficult to find cases where a cop screwed a white guy and the white guy did not deserve it. In this case Occupy weren't asking for the permits every other protest in the US has to get from the local government, which meant their marches got turned back a lot.
On the snipers, as Yanukovych said he admitted some his forces used their weapons. And it went on for a month. If somebody's running around my capital for a month, knocking out 100 protestors, and I can't figure out who it is; then I probably shouldn't be in charge anymore. Even our Beltway sniper only managed three weeks and a dozen or two killed.
On US hegemony, I often compare it to that famous quote about Democracy being the worst form of government except for all the others. I suspect a European co-hegemon would be good, because we'd have broadly compatible goals, very little to fight about militarily, and the odds you guys and our President all have the same dumb idea at once are pretty low. A non-Democratic co-hegemon would be bad, because there would be more military competition. There's a reason we supported lots of coups and un-Democratic governments in Latin America while the Soviet Union still stood, but it's gotten much better since they fell. So a Chinese Hegemon would suck.
I didn't say it was easy, and "cheapest flat-share in all London" does not sound like a good situation for a family to move into. But I wasn't arguing that the room wouldn't suck, I was arguing that it existed.
Which is exactly why the Federal Courts should leave it up to Congress to "fix" the plain text of the law if it was incorrect. This is not merely a scrivener's error that mis-numbered sections but the intended section numbering is obvious and a case where the courts can clearly determine the intended text.
From the Court's point of view Congress has had plenty of opportunities to fix the law. It could easily have passed a simple Amendment to the law clarifying the point, or put the language in the budget, or any number of things. Which means under Separation of Powers the Court is not allowed to believe that Congress disagrees with the President on this point.
And you're exaggerating the clarity here. Congress clearly intended the Federal Exchange to be an alternative to the State Exchange. During the floor debate nobody actually in Congress (note: Gruber is irrelevant to the Courts, because he's never had any capital-P Powers under the Federal Constitution, and they're trying to figure out what the people who do have Powers meant) said that states needed to set up exchanges or lose the subsidy. Delaware didn't think they;d lose the subsidy if they joined the Federal Exchange.
So they're allowing the President, not themselves, to read a gapped "or the Federal Exchange" into the subsidies clause.
They're not substituting their stupidity for Congress's. They're letting the President enforce the law as he believes the law was written pursuant to his Article II powers.
In this case Congress clearly intended the Federal Exchange to be identical to the state exchanges in almost every respect, and they clearly did not anticipate that anyone would say Delaware lost it's shot at subsidies by using the Federal Exchange. So the Court decided it wasn't unreasonable for the President to assume that there was an implied "Or the Federal exchange" in that clause of the law.
The actual architect of the law, as well as some other people involved with the writing, specifically stated at the time the law was being written that the purpose of the tax credit only applying to State exchanges was to force uncooperative states to comply with the law.
Well... sure, but who you gonna believe, the actual architect of the law, or today's left wing talking points?
We've always been at war with Oceana...
Dude, I was one of the foot-soldiers fighting for that law. I probably heard a talk by Gruber, and read a paper or two by him; but if you;d walked up to me and said "What do you think of Jonathan Gruber's opinion of the Health Care Law?" I would have had to ask you who Gruber was.
He was a consultant. Actual Congresspersons wrote the law. Obama helped design it, so he too could be considered an architect.
Bush invades Iraq to get rid of WMD and create an Israel-friendly-Jeffersonian democracy on the Tigris. None of it actually works, so his partisans now claim he was only trying to get rid of Saddam and then try to claim that we would have won that war if only Obama had managed to psychically control Maliki into signing a new status of forces agreement. Bush's tax cuts were originally designed to spend a surplus, when the economy went into a bit of a hiccup they became stimulus, and by 2008 they were boondoggles. But his partisans don't admit that.
Hell you're doing it. Much of the ACA was written with the explicit intent of getting a couple Republican votes, particularly the ladies from Maine. The fact that it didn't work does not imply that the bill wasn't written in hopes of getting their votes. The State Exchanges were one such idea.
You're not helping your case. "Referred to as a key architect" means that a) he was not the key architect, and b) there were a lot of other architects. If you have a building designed by committee, and one of the six guys on the committee says a feature he didn't work on was intended to do x, but nobody else agrees, then he's probably wrong. Which means I don't actually have to know anything about the subject to know you're wrong.
As it happens, I do know quite a bit. Joe Biden was a much more key architect then Gruber because Biden was key to getting it though the Senate. He got his state to use the Federal Exchange. Why would he have done that if he thought they wouldn't get subsidies? The State of Oregon decided at the last minute to use the Federal Exchange because their website was even worse then Obama's. They, too, would not have done that if you actually had a case. Gruber was a major consultant, because hew worked on the system in Massachusetts that inspired ObamaCare, but he was not an "architect" ion the sense that he actually wrote any parts of the law. Shakespeare was more architect of "Asterix and the Great Divide"/a> then Gruber was of ObamaCare.
Dude, this is not a variable name in your C++ program. It's a word in a law. It is not supposed to work like that.
In this case it's clear that Congress intended the federal Exchange to be a backup to the state exchange. To say they're a backup in every sense but the one that actually allows the law to work is stupid, so they assumed that when Congress said "on a State Exchange" Congress meant the Federal backup was included. To win the case the plaintiffs would have needed a lot of quotes from people actually involved in the law saying that they had some reason to actually restrict the Federal Exchange that way. In fact you've got Obama's allies in Delaware planning their law around getting subsidies on the federal Exchange, you've got his allies in Oregon scrapping their exchange at the last minute to get on the Federal Exchange. Quotes from people saying those states shouldn't get subsidies all come from either a) Conservatives who are obviously trying to undo their loss in March of 2010, and b) one guy from Massachusetts.
And even that didn't work. Quotation marks in links are apparently very difficult to use. To get to work you'll have to type in the first bit (ie: http://www.irs.gov/uac/A- ), then copy the “Qualifying-Child” and paste it into your browser. Or just google "qualifying child" irs.gov.
Here's the webpage the IRS has on qualifying children. It includes quitation marks, so apparently it can;t be used as a link on Slashdot: http://www.irs.gov/uac/A-“Qualifying-Child”
It's not a computer program. It's a human document. Plenty of terms with well-established legal meanings on one context can mean something subtly different in another context. As a tax pro, for example, a big part of my job is to tell people which credits their kid counts as a "qualifying child" for. Same kid, same legal vocabulary, but if he lives with his mom and she's signed over the exemption for Dad the kid's a qualifying child for an extra personal exemption on his return but is a qualifying child on her return for daycare costs.
In this case it's pretty clear that Congress meant for the Federal Exchange to be a back-up to the State Exchanges, and that if treating it as a distinct entity from the state exchanges would totally fuck up the law then it follows that Congress's imprecisions should be worked around.
And who was Jonathan Grubber? The Congressional Sponsor of the law? A Cabinet Secretary? Seriously, did the guy have any official title? I was actually Board Secretary of a Universal health Care Group in Michigan while we were campaigning for the law, I probably heard a talk from the guy, but if you'd told me "Jonathan Gruber said" I would have had to ask you who the fuck you were talking about.
Appeals to Authority can be perfectly good arguments, but the Authority Appealed to better actually be an Authority.
because of cronyism in state legislatures and a period of time where people thought they could amend their way out of corrupt practices? They could have just passed laws in each state that gave harsh fines and better oversight of the process that the state governments were involved in.
Sometimes I'm amazed at how little people who claim to support a historic mode of government can know about how it worked.
The thing is that in real life, giving the State House control over two Senate seats has never given the State Government any influence in DC. What happens is state-hous-level campaigns become proxies for the next Senate Campaign.
That's only a redefinition of eminent domain if you hadn't been paying attention for the past 30 years. In the 80s Coleman Young bulldozed an entire neighborhood, gave it to GM, and the Courts barely even granted the neighbors a hearing.
The Constitution says you get paid fair market price when they take your stuff, it does not say they can;t give that stuff to some random dude with a business plan.
If it's that obvious, why did Delaware decide to set up no-state-level exchange and use the Federal one? Why did Oregon decide to give up on their Exchange, and use the Federal one? It beggars belief that these two states which voted for Obama actually wanted to lock their people out from the subsidies.
Federal laws all have confusing language. The IRS, for example, had to set up a page specifically devoted to explaining the many related and subtly different meanings of the phrase "qualifying child." If you actually read the definitions section, it's pretty clear that the Federal Exchange is supposed to substitute for the State Exchange where neccesary, and thewrefore it fullfills the role of "Exchange established by the State" perfectly well.
Slashdot Mirror
Hyperloop's maximum speed is projected to be 760 MPH, Mach I at sea level is 761, and Mach numbers go down as elevation goes up.
Dude, if they're on the I5 Right of Way the are turning in 3D too much. It's got a legendary "grapevine grade" in Kern County.
If they take over a lane, or the median, and build a viaduct a couple stories high, they may be able to beat things like the Grapevine Grade. But then they have to deal with mountains and hills the I5 tunneled through, overpasses, etc. And it's kinda easy to say "we'll take over the median," but I suspect the supports for the huge towers you'd need to make the grapevine grade survivable are gonna be pretty damn expensive.
I'd be a whole lot more sympathetic to their arguments if they didn't boil down to "we costed out the stuff that doesn't cost much, and it doesn't cost much; and clearly nothing else will be relevant because we don;t want it to be relevant."
The book I read is was a Canadian PoliSci textbook. I also read quite a few of the links on the wiki page, have actually talked to actual non-Americans on these issues, read the non-American news when it brings up said issues, etc. There were also those three months I interned in Ottawa. The MP I worked with is still there, but is famous more for having tight underwear then getting legislation passed.
And I never said he couldn't be influenced. I said money wouldn't do the trick. Presidents have more then enough cash to do anything they could conceivably desire, their problem tends to be getting Congress to go along with it. Votes, that vaguely defined "strategic interest" of the United States, their perception of their legacy, etc. are all much more likely to convince a President then cash.
I didn't say they succeeded at getting GOP votes. I said they were trying to get those votes. The State-based Exchanges were one of many ideas added by Democrats in an effort to get GOP votes.
Regardless, I'm not sure why you're calling it "blame" when the only actual result of this controversy was that a bunch of allegedly conservative lawyers got donations from poor schmucks who didn't understand that their legal case was ridiculous.
Ever heard of Scotland? It has worse population density then the US East of the Mississippi. Sweden actually has a population comparable to NYC spread out over a land mass comparable to Cali. Finland's population density is more comparable to Alaska then any other US State. They don't all have record-breaking high-speed rail systems, but they all have rail systems connecting every major City.
Look at it this way: let's say we implement Hi-speed rail in a state with a highly concentrated and relatively large population. Michigan has 9 million people, 58% of them live within two counties of Detroit. Anywhere you're likely to go is within an two hours of Detroit by car, which means means the train has to stop every 20 miles, which makes it very hard to use the high speed, all the construction is somebody's house, so it's very expensive to build, etc. The rail system that makes the least amount of nonsense for the state would probably be circa-1940 speeds from Detroit to Toledo, Gary, and the Wisconsin border, with stops in major cities on the way, and an extensive streetcar system also using 1930s tech.
Let's say, OTOH, you just put a hi-speed rail line across the middle of Montana east-to-west. The low population density makes it incredibly useful because people're likely to be driving for hours and hours across the damn state otherwise. Now it's true there wouldn't necessarily be a whole lot of riders, but if the line actually goes from Minnesota to Seattle...
Rail makes sense when it goes from one major population center to another through ranch land that's cheap to get right-of-way through.
In every press release anyone has ever written on why Hyperloop is better they all say it's cheaper, and they base those cost estimates on the construction costs of gas pipelines. Pipelines are incredibly cheap partly because you can make the damn things do corkscrews if you want. If there's a random hill in the middle of your route you can just go around it, or above it, or use those corkscrews to get to the top of the hill, build a flat piece till you get past the peak, and then corkscrew downward. You don;t need bridges very often, you laugh at the very concept of a "viaduct," and tunnels are things that happen to those silly Civil Engineers.
Rail, OTOH, is incredibly expensive partly because you either have to take a very long way around the hill, go through it, or build a viaduct to make the grade manageable.
One of the reasons the train project that sparked his little Hyperloop brainstorm has costs that keep going up is that the original costs were projected from a map much like the one in the white paper, but when they send their engineers out to survey the route they find all kinds of hills/streams/valleys/dips/etc. that will require those tunnels/viaducts/bridges.
Hyperloop is going over the same terrain at Mach I. So it will require more of that shit because a grade that a train could manage a fraction of it's speed will kill the whole damn train at Mach I. And none of that is in the budget projection.
But planes essentially go straight except for the very beginning and ending of the flight. They don't have to dodge the Mountains of the Southern Coast Range. And they aren't doing it at Mach I.
So you wouldn't be plastered to the back windows, but the side windows would be a wee bit of a problem.
When the damn thing turns. Maglev trains for people are actually slower then the ones for freight because the freight trains don't have to worry about grandma surviving the trip. If they were going straight the whole way that wouldn't be a problem, altho there's some time for slower acceleration and deceleration they the hyperloopies don't seem to add in. But to get from LA to San Fran you can't go straight, you have to go up and down hills, around mountains, over rivers, etc.
A big part of the reason for Hyperloops cost advantage on rail is that Musk insists that a Hyperloop track can be cheaper. He says it would be more analogous to a oil pipeline then a rail track, and have cheaper construction, more abrupt bends, etc., which leads to higher G-Forces; this is a an even bigger problem problem for actual implementation of the idea then it would be for alternatives.
Mark my words: every trial of this will be successful until they put people in it. By the time they've smoothed out the turns, upped construction standards to virtually eliminate accidents, and reduced speed to something grandma can survive it will probably cost more then rail. It's brand-new technology and first generation check is never cheaper then the stuff it's replacing. I suspect there will be significant energy savings, and possibly some speed advantage, due to the fact that a hyperloop operates in a vacuam and there's no wind resistance, but the price advantage ain't gonna last.
On the China border, you're still thinking like a Finn. Large Central and Eastern European states afraid of invasion from the East typically act more aggressively on their western border in hopes that will convince everyone to leave them alone. remember: the Kaiser was worried about Russia, so he invaded Belgium in hopes of knocking out the French. If an anti-Russian alliance was developing there's a real chance they'd deal with it pre-emptively, particularly if they were worried about the Chinese in the East.
After all, you won't be in NATO, which has been weakened anyway (thus sparking the EU Defense Initiative that started this whole scenario), and if knocking you out of that reduces the threat in the West they can cut a deal with the Chinese in the short term and be better prepared for the long term.
Which means your strategic value to the Russians in this scenario wouldn't be geographic. They wouldn't be asking for bases or territory. It would be political. NATO couldn't protect a rich neutral, the ED-Defense Initiative couldn't protect it. Therefore the Balts and Ukrainians better deal with Russia. OTOH it's high risk, because it could also force NATO and the ED-DI together into an anti-Russian alliance. So it would be a very interesting strategic problem. The kind of interesting that you do not want to face in real life.
I understand Putin's position. While it is my contention his actions and political position are evil, that does not mean they are inherently irrational or not understandable. And I think he did quite well prior to this last crisis. But the last crisis is just such a high-risk/low-reward strategy that I suspect he was acting more out of desperation to be seen doing something then his strategic best interests. And I suspect that he under-estimated both the pull of the EU Schengen policy to the Ukrainian people (which is understandable: everybody but Kiev's protesters did this bit) and the ability/desire of Western leaders to keep promises requiring them to screw the Euromaiden protesters.
BTW, Militarized police were not the problem for Occupy Wall Street. Those guys are white. The cops are a huge problem in the black community, particularly the working-class bits where nobody can afford a lawyer, but it's very difficult to find cases where a cop screwed a white guy and the white guy did not deserve it. In this case Occupy weren't asking for the permits every other protest in the US has to get from the local government, which meant their marches got turned back a lot.
On the snipers, as Yanukovych said he admitted some his forces used their weapons. And it went on for a month. If somebody's running around my capital for a month, knocking out 100 protestors, and I can't figure out who it is; then I probably shouldn't be in charge anymore. Even our Beltway sniper only managed three weeks and a dozen or two killed.
On US hegemony, I often compare it to that famous quote about Democracy being the worst form of government except for all the others. I suspect a European co-hegemon would be good, because we'd have broadly compatible goals, very little to fight about militarily, and the odds you guys and our President all have the same dumb idea at once are pretty low. A non-Democratic co-hegemon would be bad, because there would be more military competition. There's a reason we supported lots of coups and un-Democratic governments in Latin America while the Soviet Union still stood, but it's gotten much better since they fell. So a Chinese Hegemon would suck.
This one's 290 quid.
http://www.rightmove.co.uk/pro...
I didn't say it was easy, and "cheapest flat-share in all London" does not sound like a good situation for a family to move into. But I wasn't arguing that the room wouldn't suck, I was arguing that it existed.
Do you have a guy besides Gruber on your list of writers?
Because if you don't you're at zero. The authors of the law all had official position in the US Government. Gruber was never more then a consultant.
Which is exactly why the Federal Courts should leave it up to Congress to "fix" the plain text of the law if it was incorrect. This is not merely a scrivener's error that mis-numbered sections but the intended section numbering is obvious and a case where the courts can clearly determine the intended text.
From the Court's point of view Congress has had plenty of opportunities to fix the law. It could easily have passed a simple Amendment to the law clarifying the point, or put the language in the budget, or any number of things. Which means under Separation of Powers the Court is not allowed to believe that Congress disagrees with the President on this point.
And you're exaggerating the clarity here. Congress clearly intended the Federal Exchange to be an alternative to the State Exchange. During the floor debate nobody actually in Congress (note: Gruber is irrelevant to the Courts, because he's never had any capital-P Powers under the Federal Constitution, and they're trying to figure out what the people who do have Powers meant) said that states needed to set up exchanges or lose the subsidy. Delaware didn't think they;d lose the subsidy if they joined the Federal Exchange.
So they're allowing the President, not themselves, to read a gapped "or the Federal Exchange" into the subsidies clause.
They're not substituting their stupidity for Congress's. They're letting the President enforce the law as he believes the law was written pursuant to his Article II powers.
In this case Congress clearly intended the Federal Exchange to be identical to the state exchanges in almost every respect, and they clearly did not anticipate that anyone would say Delaware lost it's shot at subsidies by using the Federal Exchange. So the Court decided it wasn't unreasonable for the President to assume that there was an implied "Or the Federal exchange" in that clause of the law.
The actual architect of the law, as well as some other people involved with the writing, specifically stated at the time the law was being written that the purpose of the tax credit only applying to State exchanges was to force uncooperative states to comply with the law.
Well ... sure, but who you gonna believe, the actual architect of the law, or today's left wing talking points?
We've always been at war with Oceana ...
Dude, I was one of the foot-soldiers fighting for that law. I probably heard a talk by Gruber, and read a paper or two by him; but if you;d walked up to me and said "What do you think of Jonathan Gruber's opinion of the Health Care Law?" I would have had to ask you who Gruber was.
He was a consultant. Actual Congresspersons wrote the law. Obama helped design it, so he too could be considered an architect.
Dude, that's fucking politics.
Bush invades Iraq to get rid of WMD and create an Israel-friendly-Jeffersonian democracy on the Tigris. None of it actually works, so his partisans now claim he was only trying to get rid of Saddam and then try to claim that we would have won that war if only Obama had managed to psychically control Maliki into signing a new status of forces agreement. Bush's tax cuts were originally designed to spend a surplus, when the economy went into a bit of a hiccup they became stimulus, and by 2008 they were boondoggles. But his partisans don't admit that.
Hell you're doing it. Much of the ACA was written with the explicit intent of getting a couple Republican votes, particularly the ladies from Maine. The fact that it didn't work does not imply that the bill wasn't written in hopes of getting their votes. The State Exchanges were one such idea.
You're not helping your case. "Referred to as a key architect" means that a) he was not the key architect, and b) there were a lot of other architects. If you have a building designed by committee, and one of the six guys on the committee says a feature he didn't work on was intended to do x, but nobody else agrees, then he's probably wrong. Which means I don't actually have to know anything about the subject to know you're wrong.
As it happens, I do know quite a bit. Joe Biden was a much more key architect then Gruber because Biden was key to getting it though the Senate. He got his state to use the Federal Exchange. Why would he have done that if he thought they wouldn't get subsidies? The State of Oregon decided at the last minute to use the Federal Exchange because their website was even worse then Obama's. They, too, would not have done that if you actually had a case. Gruber was a major consultant, because hew worked on the system in Massachusetts that inspired ObamaCare, but he was not an "architect" ion the sense that he actually wrote any parts of the law. Shakespeare was more architect of "Asterix and the Great Divide"/a> then Gruber was of ObamaCare.
Dude, this is not a variable name in your C++ program. It's a word in a law. It is not supposed to work like that.
In this case it's clear that Congress intended the federal Exchange to be a backup to the state exchange. To say they're a backup in every sense but the one that actually allows the law to work is stupid, so they assumed that when Congress said "on a State Exchange" Congress meant the Federal backup was included. To win the case the plaintiffs would have needed a lot of quotes from people actually involved in the law saying that they had some reason to actually restrict the Federal Exchange that way. In fact you've got Obama's allies in Delaware planning their law around getting subsidies on the federal Exchange, you've got his allies in Oregon scrapping their exchange at the last minute to get on the Federal Exchange. Quotes from people saying those states shouldn't get subsidies all come from either a) Conservatives who are obviously trying to undo their loss in March of 2010, and b) one guy from Massachusetts.
And even that didn't work. Quotation marks in links are apparently very difficult to use. To get to work you'll have to type in the first bit (ie: http://www.irs.gov/uac/A- ), then copy the “Qualifying-Child” and paste it into your browser. Or just google "qualifying child" irs.gov.
Here's the webpage the IRS has on qualifying children. It includes quitation marks, so apparently it can;t be used as a link on Slashdot:
http://www.irs.gov/uac/A-“Qualifying-Child”
It's not a computer program. It's a human document. Plenty of terms with well-established legal meanings on one context can mean something subtly different in another context. As a tax pro, for example, a big part of my job is to tell people which credits their kid counts as a "qualifying child" for. Same kid, same legal vocabulary, but if he lives with his mom and she's signed over the exemption for Dad the kid's a qualifying child for an extra personal exemption on his return but is a qualifying child on her return for daycare costs.
In this case it's pretty clear that Congress meant for the Federal Exchange to be a back-up to the State Exchanges, and that if treating it as a distinct entity from the state exchanges would totally fuck up the law then it follows that Congress's imprecisions should be worked around.
And who was Jonathan Grubber? The Congressional Sponsor of the law? A Cabinet Secretary? Seriously, did the guy have any official title? I was actually Board Secretary of a Universal health Care Group in Michigan while we were campaigning for the law, I probably heard a talk from the guy, but if you'd told me "Jonathan Gruber said" I would have had to ask you who the fuck you were talking about.
Appeals to Authority can be perfectly good arguments, but the Authority Appealed to better actually be an Authority.
So the Department of State is now unconstitutional because you aren't smart enough to tell when a word has two definitions in the dictionary?
because of cronyism in state legislatures and a period of time where people thought they could amend their way out of corrupt practices? They could have just passed laws in each state that gave harsh fines and better oversight of the process that the state governments were involved in.
Sometimes I'm amazed at how little people who claim to support a historic mode of government can know about how it worked.
The thing is that in real life, giving the State House control over two Senate seats has never given the State Government any influence in DC. What happens is state-hous-level campaigns become proxies for the next Senate Campaign.
That's only a redefinition of eminent domain if you hadn't been paying attention for the past 30 years. In the 80s Coleman Young bulldozed an entire neighborhood, gave it to GM, and the Courts barely even granted the neighbors a hearing.
The Constitution says you get paid fair market price when they take your stuff, it does not say they can;t give that stuff to some random dude with a business plan.
If it's that obvious, why did Delaware decide to set up no-state-level exchange and use the Federal one? Why did Oregon decide to give up on their Exchange, and use the Federal one? It beggars belief that these two states which voted for Obama actually wanted to lock their people out from the subsidies.
Federal laws all have confusing language. The IRS, for example, had to set up a page specifically devoted to explaining the many related and subtly different meanings of the phrase "qualifying child." If you actually read the definitions section, it's pretty clear that the Federal Exchange is supposed to substitute for the State Exchange where neccesary, and thewrefore it fullfills the role of "Exchange established by the State" perfectly well.