ObamaCare Despair
12th February 2015
James Taranto turns over a rock.
If the law is on your side, the juridical adage goes, argue the law. If the facts are on your side, argue the facts. If neither the law nor the facts are on your side, pound the table.
Supporters of ObamaCare have reached the stage of pounding their heads on the table.
Perhaps it will wake their brains up, assuming that they have any.
At any rate, political promises do not have the force of law unless they are enacted into law. Congress didn’t sign a contract with HCA; it passed a statute. If the statute doesn’t live up to the promise, HCA is SOL.
You’d certainly think that.
“Greenhouse fails even to mention the government’s stronger, though ultimately unpersuasive, argument that the statute is ambiguous,” lawyer Howard Slugh, whose firm has filed a brief in King v. Burwell, notes in an entertaining rejoinder at National Review Online. “Instead, she insists that the plaintiffs’ reading of the statute is utterly frivolous.” She claims that the justices “all agree on how to interpret statutory text”—and that they all agree with her.
She ends by instructing the justices (her emphasis): “Read the briefs. If you do, and you proceed to destroy [sic] the Affordable Care Act nonetheless, you will have a great deal of explaining to do—not to me, but to history.” As Slugh understates: “It takes a lot of chutzpah to admonish the Supreme Court in such fashion.”
Linda Greenhouse, for all that she has a prestige gig at Yale Law School and the New York Times, far too often makes mistakes for which any first-year law student would be spanked.
NRO’s legal blogger, Ed Whelan, makes one obvious point: “It’s difficult not to conclude that Greenhouse thinks, rightly or wrongly, that the Left’s efforts to intimidate Chief Justice Roberts in the first Obamacare case worked and are worth repeating.”
Favorite tactic of ‘progressives’ everywhere.