Speaking of sanity breaking out in unexpected places, the D.C. Court of Appeals just struck down the Obamacare subsidies in states that did not establish exchanges. The very idea of allowing statutory language to decide a case! In D.C., yet!
H/t HotAir. Also h/t to Ace, with the helpful comment, "It's not a subsidy, it's a tax refund."
5 comments:
It'll be interesting to see if it stands up to en banc review; failing that, it'll be interesting to see what logic the panel uses to reverse it. The language of the statute is clear, so the reasoning has to be something like, "The law doesn't say what it needs to say to work, so it must really say that; and we can't go back to Congress to fix it because they won't, so we must have the power to rewrite it as necessary."
Recall the nearby "precedent" CJ Roberts used to uphold Obamacare in the first place: he thoroughly distorted the "fairly possible" doctrine to create--oops, I mean find--a tax in the law, even though Congress in passing the law explicitly rejected the idea of a tax.
The DC Circuit en banc may well find a suitable meaning here, too.
Then we'll see what the Supremes have to say on the do-over.
Eric Hines
Reversed. Penumbras and the like...
A little off topic here, but you may remember my health insurance woes.
Fortunately, I no need to concern myself with paying my most excellent Doctor of 30 years as he is retiring, due to "the numerous changes affecting the practice of medicine".
I guess the Roberts blackmail only covered certain things.
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