Not looking at words
"We don't look at four words," Justice Kagan declared during the Supreme Court arguments this week on ACA subsidies in federal-exchange states. Not if they're inconvenient words, we don't! If these four words on the specific subject under dispute supported the White House's position, though, we'd sure be looking at them, wouldn't we? In further discussion it developed that the four words were being taken out of context. As we've learned in the last four or five years, that's a glaring signal for "We're straight-up lying to you."
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But Justice Elena Kagan declared that the high court must “look at the whole text, the particular context, the more general context, try to make everything harmonious with everything else.”
That's such a strange sentiment given the reality of how the law was written. Nobody in Congress ever read the whole thing together, and tried to make it harmonious. We know from the timeline that there wasn't even time for anyone to have read it -- let alone worked to make it harmonious throughout -- before they voted to pass it.
For Kagan to suggest that SCOTUS find a way to make it harmonious is tantamount to saying that SCOTUS should rewrite the law so that it works better than what Congress passed. To say that SCOTUS should look for harmony in it is like saying they should look for it to contain unicorns.
IIRC they even forgot to include a severability clause, which the supremes conveniently overlooked in an earlier go-round.
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