Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
Chief Justice Roberts says there’s an ambiguity in the Obama-Care Act: the limited definition of State Exchange and the broad requirement to subsidize qualified individuals means we can’t tell what Congress intended.
I don’t practice in federal court, maybe their rules are different. Here in Minnesota, if a Court finds the statutory language ambiguous, it looks to the intent of the legislation as articulated in testimony to the Legislature at the time of enactment. Conservative media has extensively reported on Obama-care architect Jonathan Gruber’s testimony that participants in federal exchanges were not intended to receive subsidies, only qualified individuals in state exchanges were meant to receive subsidies. That testimony wasn’t found to be dispositive; indeed, Gruber’s name does not appear anywhere in any of the opinions.
The Court said it didn’t know what the law was intended to do, then ignored the testimony of the guy who wrote the law, explaining what the law was intended to do. The only explanation for that behavior is the Court simply substituted its own preferences for those of Congress and re-wrote the law from the bench.
That’s judicial activism and once it happens, there is no further appeal. That’s why some Constitutional scholars doubt the Founders intended the Court to have the power of judicial review at all – it upsets the balance of powers and puts the Supreme Court in a position to act as unelected and unaccountable Supreme Legislators whenever the court feels like it. That’s completely antithetical to the carefully constructed powers the Founders gave each branch. And again today, we see the wisdom of their plan.
Joe Doakes
Saint Paul
Today’s big question: how do you reform a body that can declare reforms unconstitutional?
Perhaps you’re looking at it from the wrong perspective. Where would the GOP be today if it were not for “judicial activism”? It’s given the GOP a pass on social policy reform.
Only CNN could write this:
“Hours after the Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage in all 50 states, Hillary Clinton told hundreds of Virginia Democrats on Friday that “Across the board, (Republicans) are the party of the past, not the future.”
The Democratic frontrunner was speaking at a Jefferson Jackson fundraiser for the Virginia Democratic Party . . . ”
http://edition.cnn.com/2015/06/26/politics/hillary-clinton-virginia-marriage/index.html
Chief Justice Roberts is an intelligent jurist and not an ideologue. Nullifying the ACA would diminish the court by making it do one party’s political dirty work. Roberts refuses to be drawn into playing their short term political game. The Chief Justice plays a longer game, constitutional power politics.
If there was no incentive to set up state exchanges, why did we do it?
Emery, the hard part is trying to reconcile Robert’s opinion on the ACA with his dissent on the marriage ban. The words of the dissent create a cognitive dissonance with the words of the affirmation.
Loren = Exactly
The best explanation of his ruling on the ACA is that if he didn’t write it, Kagan or Sotomayor might have–and it would have been immeasurably worse.
Reverse the election of 2012, both of them are not on the court, HIDA /Obamacare is not law. Elections matter.