King v Burwell

[ElNono]

It never is cut-and-dried... when it gets boiled down to cut-and-dried for general consumption, it's inescapable that whoever is doing the boiling will add his 2c, especially when when guessing about an outcome that's yet to come.

Once upon a time, the 'mandate' was cut-and-dried too. But it wasn't. Now, that doesn't mean the Supreme Court will side with the government again, it's a different case. But truly clear-cut cases without ambiguity normally die in lower levels.

[boutons_deux]

Actually, Republicans were trying to warn everyone, all along, that this was a piece of crap law that wouldn't live up to the promises being made by the Administration.

Actually,the Repugs were trying NON-STOP slander to kill ACA because they had a strategy from 20 Jan 2009 to OBSTRUCT 100% of everything OBAMA/DEM for 4 (or 8) years.

Repugs knew ACA would help many Ms of American get health care which had a real chance of them ALSO voting DEM to show their appreciation.

ACA passed, and Repug slander and propaganda has worked quite well, with people not even affected by ACA saying it's "unpopular", while dumb ACA beneficiaries (eg, KY jelly brains) still vote Repug,and McConnell tells they them can have their very well run, very popular state exchange Kynect while repealing ACA. KY jelly brains don't even know that Kynect IS Obamacare

[boutons_deux]

...

[boutons_deux]

Law in the Raw

Nearly a week has gone by since the Supreme Court’s unexpected decision to enlist in the latest effort to destroy the Affordable Care Act, and the shock remains unabated. “This is Bush v. Gore all over again,” one friend said as we struggled to absorb the news last Friday afternoon. “No,” I replied. “It’s worse.”

What I meant was this: In the inconclusive aftermath of the 2000 presidential election, a growing sense of urgency, even crisis, gave rise to a plausible argument that someone had better do something soon to find out who would be the next president. True, a federal statute on the books defined the “someone” as Congress, but the Bush forces got to the Supreme Court first with a case that fell within the court’s jurisdiction. The 5-to-4 decision to stop the Florida recount had the effect of calling the election for the governor of Texas, George W. Bush. I disagreed with the decision and considered the contorted way the majority deployed the Cons ution’s equal-protection guarantee to be ludicrous. But in the years since, I’ve often felt like the last progressive willing to defend the court for getting involved when it did.

That’s not the case here. There was no urgency. There was no crisis of governance, not even a potential one. There is, rather, a politically manufactured argument over how to interpret several sections of the Affordable Care Act that admittedly fit awkwardly together in defining how the tax credits are supposed to work for people who buy their health insurance on the exchanges set up under the law.

Further, the case the court agreed to decide, King v. Burwell, doesn’t fit the normal criterion for Supreme Court review. There is no conflict among the federal appellate circuits. (Remember that just a month ago, the absence of a circuit conflict led the justices to decline to hear seven same-sex marriage cases?) In the King case, a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit, in Richmond, Va., unanimously upheld the government’s position that the tax subsidy is available to those who buy insurance on the federally run exchanges that are now in operation in 36 states.

A panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit ruled 2-to-1 the other way, accepting the plaintiffs’ argument that the language of the statute limits the tax subsidies to those who buy insurance through the state exchanges, which only 14 states have chosen to set up. The full appeals court quickly vacated the panel’s judgment and agreed to rehear the case. The new argument was set for next month, and the briefs were already filed. The absence of a circuit conflict and an imminent rehearing by the country’s most important court of appeals would, in the past, have led the Supreme Court to refrain from getting involved.

So no, this isn’t Bush v. Gore. This is a naked power grab by conservative justices who two years ago just missed killing the Affordable Care Act in its cradle, before it fully took effect. When the court agreed to hear the first case, there actually was a conflict in the circuits on the cons utionality of the individual insurance mandate.

So the Supreme Court’s grant of review was not only unexceptional but necessary: a neutral act. The popular belief then that the court’s intervention indicated hostility to the law was, at the least, premature.

Not so this time. There is simply no way to describe what the court did last Friday as a neutral act. Now that the justices have blown their own cover, I notice the hint of a slightly defensive tone creeping into the commentary of some of those who have been cheering the prospect of rendering the Affordable Care Act unworkable: that as a statutory case, without major cons utional implications, any problems for ordinary Americans that result from a ruling against the government can be fixed by Congress (where House Republicans have voted 50 times to repeal the entire law) or by the states themselves (36 of which failed to set up their own exchanges, thus requiring the federal government to step in as provided by the law).

Sure.

It bears repeating that what’s at stake is whether the Affordable Care Act can continue on its successful trajectory or whether it will collapse into the “death spiral” it was structured to avoid. The reason goes back to the individual mandate, the cons utionality of which the Supreme Court upheld by a 5-to-4 vote two years ago. The policy reason for requiring everyone to carry health insurance is to guarantee a big pool of basically healthy people and to prevent what might otherwise be the smart strategic behavior of buying insurance only when illness strikes (behavior the law’s “guarantee issue” provision would otherwise invite, since no one can be turned down on the basis of a pre-existing condition.)

The law is also designed to make insurance affordable, with no one being required to spend more than 8 percent of his or her income of health insurance.
Federal income tax subsidies available on the exchanges are supposed to bring premium costs below that threshold; without the credits, many people would be exempt from the individual mandate and the law would fail.

Congress assumed that most states would set up exchanges; most states, led by red-state governors, did not. Section 1321 of the law provides that when a state defaults, the secretary of health and human services shall “establish and operate such Exchange within the State.” Clear enough: “such Exchange” implies, without explicitly saying so, that the federal exchange stands in for the missing state’s exchange and assumes its functions. But another section, 1401, explicitly makes the tax subsidies available to taxpayers and their dependents who buy insurance “through an Exchange established by the State.” Those challenging the law say this means “only the state” and that the I.R.S. is not authorized to give subsidies to the more than five million people enrolled through federally run exchanges.

These two provisions, part of a 900-page statute that was cobbled together without going through the usual House-Senate conference committee in which it might have been cleaned up, are the source of the confusion.

The answer to the problem, as the Fourth Circuit panel found unanimously in the King case, is obvious. It’s a basic principle of administrative law that when a federal statute is ambiguous, courts defer to the agency’s interpretation — here, the I.R.S. regulation that makes the tax credits available without regard to whether the exchange is state or federal.

The 1984 decision that established this deference principle, Chevron U.S.A. v. Natural Resources Defense Council, Inc., is so central to the modern understanding of how the government works that it is among the most often invoked Supreme Court decisions of all time, cited in some 13,000 judicial decisions so far, a number that grows at the rate of about 1,000 a year. The tax provisions of the Affordable Care Act fall so naturally onto the “Chevron deference” landscape that it would take an agenda-driven act of judicial will to keep them out and to conclude that Congress enacted a law that contained the seeds of its own destruction.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. knows something about taxes. He saved the Affordable Care Act from his usual allies two years ago by his opinion deeming the individual mandate’s penalty provision to fall within Congress’s tax power. This case puts him back under what I can only assume is an unwelcome spotlight.

It takes the votes of four of the nine justices to accept a case. Certainly JusticesAnthony M. Kennedy, Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel A. Alito Jr. — the four who two years ago would have invalidated not only the individual mandate but the entire law — voted to hear King v. Burwell.

(Michael A. Carvin, the plaintiffs’ lawyer, predicted as much last month, declaring in an uninhibited interview that the pending rehearing before an appeals court that has recently attained a majority of Democratic-appointed judges would be no deterrent to the justices who wanted to take the case. “I don’t know that four justices, who are needed here, are going to give much of a damn about what a bunch of Obama appointees on the D.C. Circuit think,” he told a reporter from Talking Points Memo.)

An intriguing question is whether there was a fifth vote as well, from the chief justice. I have no idea, although I can’t imagine why he would think that taking this case was either in the court’s interest or in his own; just two months ago, at a public appearance at the University of Nebraska, he expressed concern that the “partisan rancor” of
Washington could spill over onto the court.

Here’s another possible scenario, just a theory:

that the four, still steaming over what the right wing regards as the chief justice’s betrayal two years ago, voted to hear King v. Burwell not only for its destructive potential, but precisely to put the heat on John Roberts.

I hadn’t really focused on this idea until I read a piece that John Yoo posted on National Review Online the day after the court granted the case. Professor Yoo, formerly of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel and now at the University of California at Berkeley, wrote that

the new case gave the chief justice “the chance to atone for his error in upholding Obamacare” and that “it will be the mission of his chief justiceship to repair the damage.”

John Yoo — yes, the Bush administration lawyer whose “torture memos” attempted to justify that administration’s “enhanced interrogation” policies — is a smart man, a former law clerk to Justice Thomas who remains well connected at the court. His choice of the words "atone” and “mission,” with their religious resonance addressed to the devoutly Catholic chief justice, is no accident.

So this case is rich in almost every possible dimension. Its arrival on the Supreme Court’s docket is also profoundly depressing. In decades of court-watching, I have struggled — sometimes it has seemed against all odds — to maintain the belief that the Supreme Court really is a court and not just a collection of politicians in robes. This past week, I’ve found myself struggling against the impulse to say two words: I surrender.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/11/13...-raw.html?_r=0

[Yonivore]

It never is cut-and-dried... when it gets boiled down to cut-and-dried for general consumption, it's inescapable that whoever is doing the boiling will add his 2c, especially when when guessing about an outcome that's yet to come.

Once upon a time, the 'mandate' was cut-and-dried too. But it wasn't. Now, that doesn't mean the Supreme Court will side with the government again, it's a different case. But truly clear-cut cases without ambiguity normally die in lower levels.

Sometimes, issues are intentionally muddled so as to appear more complicated when, in reality, they're not. The law, on this point, is plain.

Exhibit A: Jonathan Gruber

[Th'Pusher]

Sometimes, issues are intentionally muddled so as to appear more complicated when, in reality, they're not. The law, on this point, is plain.

Exhibit A: Jonathan Gruber

And if the court sides against the government, and the millions of people who are currently getting subsidized healthcare through federal exchanges stop receiving the subsidies, what do you think will happen? What do you think those red state poli ians are going to do when that subsidy is taken away?

[boutons_deux]

Sometimes, issues are intentionally muddled so as to appear more complicated when, in reality, they're not. The law, on this point, is plain.

Exhibit A: Jonathan Gruber

oh, pussy eater is legal scholar!

your "POINT" in cherry-picked isolation is clear. So you really think the writers of the law intended it to self-destruct via this point, or was this point an misstatement, an error in total contrast with the rest of the law?

[boutons_deux]

The Odds That Each Justice Will Vote To Destroy Obamacare

On Wednesday, the justices will hear oral arguments in King v. Burwell. They will consider whether to take health care away from millions of Americans. They will consider whether to cast much of the health care sector into chaos, potentially destabilizing the individual insurance market in many states. They will consider whether to undercut a program that provides health care to children, potentially leaving 5 million of these children uninsured. And they will consider whether thousands of wives get to hold their husbands again and whether thousands of fathers get to kiss their daughters again.

By one estimate, nearly 10,000 Americans will die every year if the justices vote against Obamacare in King.

King, in the words of the New York Times‘ Linda Greenhouse, enlists the Supreme Court “into the front lines of a partisan war.”

It rests on the notion that six words of a nearly 1,000 page law can be read out of context to destroy one of the law’s central functions.

And, yet, the King plaintiffs could prevail. The biggest predictor of how a judge will vote in an Obamacare case has been the judge’s political party, and five of the nine justices are Republicans.

Based on our analysis of the law, the justices’ past statements, and their ability to resist partisan pressure in the past, here is a breakdown of how each justice is likely to vote, ranked from the most likely to uphold the law to the most likely to take health care away from millions:

Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan

As recently as last week, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg penned an opinion joined by Chief Justice John Roberts plus all of her fellow liberal justices except for one, which rejected the idea that a few words of a law may be read out of context by judges attempting to divine those words’ meaning. “Whether a statutory term is unambiguous,” Ginsburg wrote, “does not turn solely on dictionary definitions of its component words.” Rather, a court must look to “the specific context in which that language is used, and the broader context of the statute as a whole.’” Though Justice Elena Kagan was the sole Democratic appointee not to join Ginsburg’s opinion, she nevertheless snuck a pointed statement into her dissent that rejects the King plaintiffs’ acontextual method of reading the law. “I agree with the plurality (really, who does not?) that context matters in interpreting statutes,” Kagan wrote, adding that “[w]e do not ‘construe the meaning of statutory terms in a vacuum.’ Rather, we interpret particular words ‘in their context and with a view to their place in the overall statutory scheme.’”

It would simply be extraordinary if the Court’s Democrats, two of whom were appointed by President Obama, voted to gut Obamacare based on the proposition that the words of a law can be read outside of their context. There is an off chance, however, that one or more of the Court’s more liberal members could embrace the plaintiffs’ reading of Obamacare if that helps them build a majority around a different legal theory that will also save the law.

The plaintiffs argue that states that set up their own health exchange where individuals can buy subsidized health insurance — rather than permitting the federal government to do so for them — are the only states where residents may receive their share of hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of tax credits enabling them to afford insurance. Even if the plaintiffs are correct that the law should be read this way, however, several amicus briefs make a strong argument that imposing such a condition upon the states violates states rights and would therefore be uncons utional.

In NFIB v. Sebelius, the last lawsuit seeking to destroy Obamacare, Justices Stephen Breyer and Kagan joined the Court’s Republicans in making the law’s Medicaid expansion optional. Though those of us who were not a party to the Court’s private communications can only speculate as to whether Breyer and Kagan did so out of a sincere belief or because they agreed to lend their name to this controversial decision in order to help convince Chief Justice John Roberts to save the remainder of the law, it is worth noting that Kagan, in particular, seemed very unlikely to label the original Medicaid expansion uncons utional during oral arguments. So, while it is unlikely that any of the Court’s Democrats will actually vote to strike down a major part of Obamacare in King, it is possible that one or
more of them will throw a bone to conservatives if that helps convince one of the Court’s Republicans to save the law.

Odds the Democratic appointees — Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor and Kagan — will vote to uphold Obamacare: over 99 percent.

Chief Justice John Roberts



Roberts proved fickle in the first Supreme Court case seeking to kill the Affordable Care Act. Although Roberts initially voted to strike down the law’s individual mandate, he laterflipped his vote to uphold the bulk of the law, breaking with his fellow Republicans in the process. CBS News’s Jan Crawford, a veteran Supreme Court reporter who is well-connected on the Republican side of the Court, later suggested that Roberts may have flipped his vote because he is “sensitive to how the court is perceived by the public.” Though Crawford caveats her reporting by noting that “[i]t is not known why Roberts changed his view on the mandate and decided to uphold the law,” she notes that “countless news articles in May warning of damage to the court” may have influenced the chief justice’s thinking.

Should Roberts turn around and gut Obamacare in King, he would only confirm many people’s fears that the Supreme Court has become the judicial wing of the Republican Party. As the Washington Post‘s Robert Barnes wrote on Friday, King presents Roberts with a dilemma: “Can Roberts’s portrayal of the Supreme Court as above politics surviveanother round with the most partisan issue of the decade?”

Given the weak legal arguments advanced by the plaintiffs, and the minimal likelihood that any of the Court’s Democrats would join a decision gutting the law, numerous commentators have concluded that the answer to this question is “no” if the justices decide to strike down the tax credits. As Washington & Lee law professor Tim Jost said in a Center for American Progress-produced video, “a 5-to-4 decision invalidating the premium tax credits would seriously call into question the legitimacy of the Court.” He added that such a decision would “pretty transparently” happen “for political reasons.”

Competing against Roberts’ desire to preserve the legitimacy of his Court is the fact that he remains a conservative Republican, and he’s hardly been shy about advancing a very conservative agenda in areas such as voting rights and campaign finance. The chief’s conservative instincts were on full display in his initial vote on Obamacare three years ago. He overcame those instincts that time, but it is far from clear that he will be able to do so again.

Odds Chief Justice Roberts votes to uphold Obamacare: 50 percent.

Justice Anthony Kennedy

In describing Kennedy’s reaction to Roberts’ vote in NFIB, one source told Jan Crawford that Kennedy was “relentless” in trying to bring Roberts back in line with his fellow Republicans. Four of the Court’s Republicans signed a dissent calling for the entirety of the Affordable Care Act to be repealed, and Kennedy read that opinion from the bench on the same day that Roberts read the majority opinion saving most of the law (reading a dissent from the bench is one method that members of the Court use to convey extraordinary displeasure with a decision). Given Kennedy’s anger that the Court did not repeal the law three years ago, he is now an unlikely vote in its favor.

That said, there are two mitigating factors that could sway Justice Kennedy. The first is the argument that the King plaintiffs’ reading of the law violates states rights. Kennedy is a strong advocate for federalism; he believes that states’ rights “protect[] the liberty of the individual from arbitrary power.” If he can set aside his disdain for Obamacare in King, he could potentially score a major victory for a cause that he has long championed.

The other factor is that Kennedy has, at times, been willing to break from the Court’s conservatives when he believes that the welfare of children is at stake. As an amicus brief explains, the King plaintiffs’ argument does not simply threaten people insured through the exchanges, it also threatens the health care of as many as 5 million children insured through the CHIP program. That risk to children’s health may give Kennedy pause.

Nevertheless, Kennedy remains an unlikely vote to uphold the law in this case. His previous actions in NFIB are likely to be repeated.

Odds Justice Kennedy votes to uphold Obamacare: 15 percent.

Justice Antonin Scalia

If this were an ordinary case, Scalia’s vote to uphold the tax credits would be all but certain. Just five months before the Court agreed to hear King, Justice Scalia wrote in Utility Air Regulatory Group v. EPA about “the fundamental canon of statutory construction that the words of a statute must be read in their context and with a view to their place in the overall statutory scheme.” A book that Scalia co-authored in 2012 explains that “no interpretive fault is more common than the failure to follow the whole-text canon, which calls on the judicial interpreter to consider the entire text, in view of its structure and of the physical and logical relation of its many parts.” For Scalia to look at Obamacare and conclude that six words may be read out of context from the law as a whole would be an extraordinary departure from the conservative justice’s previously stated views.

Nevertheless, we’ve seen this movie before. Scalia’s own opinion in Gonzales v. Raich provided a road map for a decision upholding the Affordable Care Act in NFIB, but Scalia decided not to follow it. He voted instead to repeal the entire law.

It is possible that Scalia will feel more of a compulsion in King than he did in NFIB to follow his own previous decisions. But we wouldn’t bet on it.

Odds Justice Scalia votes to uphold Obamacare: less than 10 percent.

Justice Clarence Thomas

Like Scalia, Thomas has also expressed the view that the words of a law must not be read out of context. Rather, according to Thomas, courts should look to “the language itself, the specific context in which that language is used, and the broader context of the statute as a whole.” Thomas, however, is well to Scalia’s right on many issues, and he has not gone as far out on a limb as Scalia has by authoring a book that is incompatible with the plaintiffs’ arguments in King. It is not impossible that Thomas would vote to uphold the tax credits, but it is exceedingly unlikely.

Odd Justice Thomas votes to uphold Obamacare: less than 5 percent.

Justice Samuel Alito

Justice Alito is the most partisan member of the Court’s conservative bloc. Among other things, he is the only one of the Court’s Republicans who has never broken with the four other Republican members of the Court to vote with its four Democrats. He frequently uses his questions during oral arguments to bore holes in the position supported by liberals. Alito is the last justice who will cross over to uphold part of President Obama’s chief legislative accomplishment.

Odds Justice Alito votes to uphold Obamacare: he is more likely to be struck by lightning while committing in-person voter fraud.

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/201...ase-obamacare/

iow, No Law is Above The Politics.

[boutons_deux]

VRWC DEATH PANELS!
End Obamacare, and people could die. That’s okay.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/end-obamacare-and-people-could-die-thats-okay/2015/01/23/f436df30-a1c4-11e4-903f-9f2faf7cd9fe_story.html

Will Human-Americans demonstrate, risk police brutality, holding signs:

"American Lives Matter

Not your ing conservative ideology"

[boutons_deux]

Q. King v. Burwell is avery different type of case. How does the issue at the center of it reflect Federalist Society thinking?

A. Unlike the 2012 challenge to the ACA, King v. Burwell is not a cons utional case. It’s a statutory case. At issue is whether people in states with federally facilitated health insurance exchanges are en led to receive the tax benefits that make insurance affordable. The parties in this case are asking the Supreme Court to interpret just five words: what is meant by an “exchange established by the State.”

There are two very different ways to look at the issue of statutory interpretation. For many years, the dominant view was: If the meaning of that language is not immediately apparent, judges should look to legislative history – what was Congress’s intent when they wrote those words? In the case of Obamacare, the legislative intent is pretty clear: Congress’s aim was to provide tax benefits to lower income Americans to help underwrite the cost of insurance.

But since the 1980s, there’s been a quiet revolution in statutory interpretation by the courts. Instead of taking into consideration legislative history and intent, there’s been a shift to just looking at the plain meaning of the text and ignoring everything else because supposedly things like legislative history are too subjective.

This revolution began with a core group of Federalist Society members centered in the Reagan Justice Department. Justice Scalia has been a major proponent.

If the plaintiffs in King v. Burwell prevail, the Federalist Society will have two victories.

The obvious one is that Obamacare will suffer another major setback.

The other will be to more firmly entrench this idea of statutory interpretation – we shouldn’t look at legislative history; we shouldn’t look at consequences; we should just look at the plain meaning of the words, and our inquiry ends there. The Supreme Court majority’s approach could well be: The ACA says what it says — let Congress fix it. But they know full well that this Congress will not pass that fix.

Q. What do you think the outcome of King v. Burwell will be?


A. Because of this 30-year revolution in statutory interpretation, the justices have a shield. My sense is that conservatives have enough cover that if five of them want to strike down the law, they will.

http://www.propublica.org/article/be...ent=&utm_name=

[boutons_deux]

Never mind that the law specifically requires the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services to “establish and operate such exchange[s] within the states.” Never mind that nobody anywhere understood the Affordable Care Act to have such a restrictive meaning when it was being debated, enacted and put into operation. Such an interpretation certainly never came up during the difficult period when the HealthCare.gov website labored to get up to speed.

Never mind too that time-worn Supreme Court precedents direct judges interpreting laws to consider not isolated snippets of language, but “the specific context in which that language is used, and the broader context of the statute as a whole.” (The wording is from a 1997 opinion by Justice Clarence Thomas.)

For that matter, if anybody in Congress on either side thought the law meant what the plaintiff’s lawyers in King v. Burwellclaim, why have we been having the political battle of the century about it? Why vote 56 times to repeal a law that only applies in 16 of the 50 states?

It’s an odd form of legalistic fundamentalism the justices must consider, the cons utional equivalent of a guy trying to beat a ticket for driving 95 mph in a school zone because a typo reads “ozone.”

The wonder is that the Court elected to hear the case at all after a three-judge appeals court in Richmond rejected it unanimously.

And the scary question is why?

http://www.nationalmemo.com/be-very-...-%202015-03-04

Why? because the SCOTUS5 intends up America, which is why Repugs put them on SCOTUS.

[boutons_deux]

The Supreme Court appeared closely divided Wednesday during heated arguments over President Obama's health care law, but questions from Justice Anthony Kennedy gave proponents hope the statute will be upheld.

During sometimes heated oral arguments, all four liberal justices hammered the law's challengers, suggesting that the consequences of eliminating tax subsidies in federal health insurance exchanges would raise a serious cons utional problem.

But conservative justices shot back against the government's lawyer, contending that the law clearly was written to exclude federal subsidies in states that did not create their own exchanges, or online marketplaces. If the court strikes down those tax credits, they argued

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/p...care/24320547/

SCOTUS5, ALL POLITICS ALL THE TIME

4 words totally override the entire context, intention, and meaning of ACA!

"established by the state" Bingo, ACA is edy the SCOTUS5, for 4 words.

[boutons_deux]

Here's some vintage Tony:

If a statute has a plain meaning, it means what it means, even if the consequences of that interpretation are significant, Justice Scalia said. It "can't be the rule" that a court's job is to "twist" words of a statute for them to make sense, he said.

He and his buddy Sam Alito are either absolute idiots when it comes to their understanding of how Congress works, or they're just mendacious s . But maybe both:

Justice Alito then challenged the prophecies of doom the government and its allies have made should the plaintiffs win. If the consequences were so bad, states without exchanges doubtless would quickly act to set them up. "Going forward there would be no harm," he told Mr. Verrilli. The solicitor general said that was easier said than done, stressing how complicated it is to set up an exchange and lamenting that until it was up and running, individuals currently getting subsidies would have them taken away. Justice Alito said the court could mitigate that problem by delaying implementation of such a ruling so that states could get their exchanges up.

Justice Scalia was thinking along similar lines. If the court's ruling turned out to be so disastrous, he said, "you really think Congress is just going to sit there?"

"This Congress?" Mr. Verrilli replied incredulously. The courtroom erupted in laughter.

if the SCOTUS strikes down the ACA's federal exchanges, the Republicans in charge of Capitol Hill will gleefully do nothing to fix them.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/0...28Daily+Kos%29

Thanks, Repugs and Repug voters!

[boutons_deux]

Joseph Weisenthal @TheStalwart
Follow
BOOM. Hospital stocks surge after Justice Kennedy criticizes Obamacare challenge http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-04/top-court-s-obamacare-ruling-raises-risks-to-hospitals-insurers …
10:50 AM - 4 Mar 2015

[boutons_deux]

Lawyer Arguing Against Obamacare: Statute Written By 'White Women And Minorities'



Michael Carvin, the attorney arguing on behalf of the plaintiffs in the King v. Burwell case, said this challenge is different because the argument against the law centers on a statute that was "written by white women and minorities."

Carvin's comments were published in a Wall Street Journal profile of him on Tuesday, a day before oral arguments began in the King v. Burwell lawsuit.

Carvin argued that the difference between this lawsuit and the one in 2012 is that unlike the 2012 challenge, the argument on Wednesday is on "a statute that was written three years ago, not by dead white men but by living white women and minorities."

"It hasn't had time to 'grow' or 'evolve,'" Carvin added, a jab that mocks terms liberals have used for cons utional doctrines that conservatives have argued aren't supported by the Cons ution.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewir...+%28TPMNews%29

In Repug/tea bagger/conservative world, white women and minorities are not to be permitted any powers, are to be denied access the Euro-American white man's 1st class status.

[boutons_deux]

Less Than 30 Percent Of Americans Support Supreme Court Nixing Obamacare Subsidies

A Hart Research Associates Poll released on March 2, finds that by a solid 63-29 majority, American voters want to keep Obamacare intact. The national survey of 800 registered voters, conducted on behalf of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), found that 63 percent of respondents would disapprove, if the Supreme Court restricted the availability of tax credits under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), with 44 percent strongly disapproving.

http://www.politicususa.com/2015/03/...iticus+USA+%29

and you 30% know who are, don't you?

[boutons_deux]

Letter cited by anti-Obamacare lawyer in Supreme Court case was literally a joke


Michael Carvin, the attorney for the plaintiffs in King v. Burwell, the case pending before the Supreme Court that could end health insurance subsidies for millions, is basing part of his argument on a joke letter officials from seven states sent to the federal government.

The plaintiffs' argument in King is that Congress intended to limit subsidies to states that set up their own insurance exchanges and that, furthermore, all the states knew this going in.

In a panel discussion sponsored by insurance industry group America’s Health Insurance Plans, Carvin pointed to this letter from state officials which included a question about the legal authority the federal government was using on subsidies.

The problem is that the whole letter was basically a prank, these state officials childishly mocking a letter they had received from the federal government requesting information. A lot of information.

According to Tim Jost, a health policy expert and law professor at Washington and Lee University, the letter was a "joke."

The states, Jost explains, "got what they thought was an unreasonable demand from the feds and they sent back a letter that mirrored the request they got from the federal government."

A state official who signed the letter, who spoke to ThinkProgress on condition of anonymity, confirmed Jost's understanding.

The letter, which is seven pages long and consists almost entirely of a list of requests for information from the federal government, was written to mock a similar request that HHS sent the states in earnest. "We weren't spoofing a letter from the Feds exactly," the state official explains, "but we were very much spoofing their proposed do entation requirements of states that wanted to set up a state-based exchange by restating these in a form that would apply to the Feds." He adds that letter was drafted "purely to illustrate the inanity of the federal requirements—and their own inability to provide anywhere near close to the same information to the states."

ThinkProgress has both letters and they are essentially identical.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2015/0...8Daily+Kos%29#