Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Joe Doakes
\nSaint Paul<\/p><\/blockquote>\nToday’s big question: \u00a0how do you reform a body that can declare reforms unconstitutional?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[82],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-54035","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-scotus"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54035","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=54035"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54035\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":54036,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/54035\/revisions\/54036"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=54035"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=54035"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=54035"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}