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The Daily Signal
Obama Taunts
Supreme Court on Obamacare Case
Hans von Spakovsky & Elizabeth Slattery
June 09, 2015
It’s déjà vu all over again. President Obama’s comments about King v.
Burwell during a press conference at the G-7 summit in Germany earlier
this week echo those he made when the Affordable Care Act was before
the Supreme Court in 2012.
Putting on his constitutional-lawyer-in-chief hat in 2012, Obama said,
“I’m confident that the Supreme Court will not take what would be an
unprecedented, extraordinary step of overturning a law that was passed
by a strong majority of a democratically elected Congress.”
Apparently, Obama believes that as long as a majority in Congress
agrees, they can do anything they want, no matter how unconstitutional.
Obama mostly won that case, and flash forward three years, he’s trying
to shame the justices into ruling in his favor again. This week he said
King v. Burwell—a challenge to the Obamacare tax subsidies—should be
“an easy case” and one that “probably shouldn’t even have been taken
up.” He claims that:
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“Under well-established statutory interpretation, approaches that have
been repeatedly employed—not just by liberal, Democratic judges, but by
conservative judges like some on the current Supreme Court—you
interpret a statute based on what the intent and meaning and the
overall structure of the statute provides for.”
Obama says the Court should do what “most legal scholars who’ve looked
at this would expect them to do” and that he is “optimistic that the
Supreme Court will play it straight when it comes to the
interpretation.”
First of all, the president’s claim that the Court shouldn’t have even
taken up the case ignores the fact that two federal appellate courts
reached opposite conclusions on the fundamental issue at stake. It is
“Constitutional Law 101” that the Supreme Court is responsible for
resolving disagreements between the federal courts of appeal, and cases
involving such conflicting holdings, especially on important pieces of
legislation, are the most likely cases to be taken up by the Court.
Second, it’s the Obama administration—not the challengers—that have the
principle of “statutory interpretation” exactly backwards. The
statutory provision at issue limits the availability of federal tax
credits only to individuals who purchase health insurance on an
exchange “established by the state.” When a majority of states chose
not to set up exchanges, the administration extended these tax credits
to those who purchase insurance on the federally-run exchange.
Obama is ignoring the first rule of statutory interpretation: Read the
statute. The text of the statute is not on his side. Instead, the
administration follows the example of Humpty Dumpty in Lewis Carroll’s
“Through the Looking-Glass” that “when I use a word … it means just
what I choose it to mean.” For the administration, “up” means “down,”
“stop” means “go,” and “state” means “state plus federal government.”
The administration argues that a cramped reading of the statute (that
is, actually interpreting the words to mean what they say) frustrates
its purpose of expanding insurance coverage and that the Court must
look at the broader context of the law. But it is the text of the law,
rather than context or the aspirations of certain members of Congress
for the law, that must be enforced.
In any event, even if one were to ignore the plain language and look at
the “intent and meaning and the overall structure of the statute” as
Obama urges, the administration should still lose. The evidence
established in the case documents that Congress intentionally
structured the subsidies this way to encourage states to set up
exchanges. As the challengers point out in their brief, “the
conditioning of tax credits on state-run exchanges” was considered a
“robust” incentive that would accomplish that goal. The administration
just didn’t believe that states would turn down billions of free
federal dollars.
Obama and other supporters were apparently completely taken aback when
a majority of states refused to take the financial bait and set up
state exchanges. The administration has been scrambling ever since to
convince the public and the courts that what actually happened didn’t
really happen, and that they intended all along to provide subsidies
through the federal exchange, too.
The president is not alone in his effort to intimidate the Court to
rule in his favor. The Major newspapers and many others have issued
dire warnings that a ruling against the administration would signal a
death knell for the reputation of the Roberts Court. But the real death
knell would be if the Court ignored the plain language of the statute
because of the obvious political and other implications and opted to
rewrite the law to achieve the result the administration wants.
In the best interests of constitutional government, the justices should
tune out these attempts to bully the Court. As Michael Carvin, the
challengers’ lawyer argued, “This case may be socially consequential
and politically sensitive, but that only heightens the importance of
judicial fidelity to the rule of law.”
Read this and other articles at The Daily Signal
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