ACA supporters claim that the law would not have been written in such a self-defeating and dysfunctional way.......despite the fact that the ACA architect, Jonathan Gruber, said [on camera] in 2012 that "if you're a state and you don't set up an exchange that means your citizens don't get their tax credits"
by Larry Simons
July 6, 2015
Recently, on June 25, the United States Supreme Court ruled in King v. Burwell, the case in which plaintiffs argued that the plain language of the Affordable Care Act provided subsidies only to those people living in states with state-operated exchanges, that the wording was ambiguous and that the words "established by the State" could also be interpreted as "all exchanges, State and Federal".
After the decision, a very heated dissent was written by Justice Antonin Scolia, in which he stated:
"The Court holds that when the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act says 'Exchange established by the State it means 'Exchange established by the State or the Federal Government.' That is of course quite absurd, and the Court’s 21 pages of explanation make it no less so." He then ridiculed the decision, saying that the Affordable Care Act should be called "SCOTUScare".
I agree. As Judge Andrew Napolitano stated in the video below, the fact that there were 21 pages of explanation is quite telling. Napolitano asks:
"How can it take 21 pages to explain what four words mean? Unless you're obviously trying to change the ordinary plain understanding of those four words and you need 21 pages in which to do it?"
Writing for the Huffington Post, Phil Schiliro states:
"When Democratic leaders huddled in the White House in January 2010 to resolve differences between the Senate and House bills, this issue never came up. When the Congressional Budget Office and even the Heritage Foundation analyzed the ACA, this issue never came up. When the law was debated in the Senate for 25 days--in the second longest continuous Senate floor debate in history -- this issue never came up. And when the President met all day with Republicans and Democrats in February 2010 on national television--in a final attempt to find common ground -- this issue never came up. It never came up because everyone had a common understanding."
Oh bullshit. The reason why no one debated this issue and why it never came up is the fact that most likely not a single Senator or Congressman read this bill. What I do find interesting is something Judge Napolitano mentions in the above clip. He states:
"He [Justice Roberts] created an argument that was not in the record. Neither side, neither the government or the challengers said this language was ambiguous. Just like 3 years ago, neither side, neither the Obama administration or the challengers claimed that the financial consequences of the failure to comply with the individual mandate was a tax, then he came up with the tax argument, today he came up with the ambiguity argument. It's an extremely dangerous argument, and it cuts both ways, liberal or conservative. It's a power argument. Justice Scalia points out it enables a majority of the court to take plain ordinary English words which the meaning of which everyone knows, declare them ambiguous in this context and rewrite the statute to suit the court."
But how...how on Earth can anyone rule that the wording of this law was ambiguous when in 2012, ACA architect Jonathan Gruber, speaking at a workshop said this?:
"In the law it says if the states don't provide them [the exchange itself, not the subsidy] then the federal backstop will. The federal government has been sort of slow in putting out its backstop I think partly because they want to sort of squeeze the states to do it. I think what's important to remember politically about this is if you're a state and you don't set up an exchange that means your citizens don't get their tax credits. But your citizens still pay the taxes that support this bill. So you're essentially saying to your citizens, you're going to pay all the taxes to help all the other states in the country. I hope that that's a blatant enough political reality that states will get their act together and realize there are billions of dollars at stake here in setting up these exchanges and that they'll do it, but you know once again the politics can get ugly around this."
watch his say this for yourself
Here, Gruber is admitting that people in states where there is no exchange set up will not receive the tax credits, and yet the Supreme Court said just the opposite? This was the main architect of the law admitting the complete opposite the position taken by 6 of the 9 Supreme Court justices. It doesn't get much clearer than that folks.
If this is not blatant unequivocal evidence that this ruling was not based on the interpretations of law and facts, then none exists. The main writer of the law admits there is no ambiguity whatsoever in the wording of the statute and yet the Supreme Court rewrites the law and this is not national news?
This is exactly why Justice Scalia stated, "Words no longer have meaning if an Exchange that is not established by a State is ‘established by the State".
It was not the court's job to base their ruling on the outcome of the ruling: that 6-11 million people would be without subsidies. It was not the court's job to base the ruling on what they think the writers of the law meant to say. It is their sole job to interpret law as written, period.