RE: Supreme Court upholds Obamacare subsidies
June 25, 2015 at 11:15 am
(June 25, 2015 at 10:44 am)vorlon13 Wrote: My understanding of the 'plainly worded' rationale the analysts were using led me to think the subsidies were dead, regardless of merit or lack of merit of having them. 'Weaseling' springs to mind, unbidden.
The 'plainly worded' thing I note is employed to dismantle religiosity all time here, so I'm somewhat disoriented now . . .
The underlying principles at play here in the majority's opinion seem to be:
1a) If there is exactly only one thing a particular sentence in a statute could mean, you have to take it to mean that. (This is clearly the law.)
1b) If there's more than one thing a particular sentence could mean, you have to look at the context to determine its meaning. (This is clearly the law.)
2) In some cases, like this one, the context can be used to determine whether there's one or more than one meaning. (This may be a stretch.)
3) The more tension there is between the "plain" meaning of a sentence and the rest of the act, the more likely it is that the plain meaning is not the one intended. (This is clearly the law.)
4) Besides a statement with a plain meaning that directly contradicts the purpose of the act, the most possible tension you could get between the plain meaning of a sentence and an act is if the plain meaning would result in the act being doomed to failure. (This probably isn't the law per se, but seems to make sense.)
5) Congress doesn't write laws it wishes to be doomed to failure. (For certain populations of Congress, this might not be
true, but it's clearly an assumption the court must make.)
So, each of those principles applied to the ruling here:
1) "Established by the State" seems to have only one meaning.
2) The act, earlier, says (paraphrasing) "if the State
does not create an exchange, the Secretary shall set such an exchange up for the State." "Such an exchange" seems to mean "there shouldn't be a functional difference between the State's exchange and the Federal exchange." But, allowing subsidies for only State and not Federal exchanges
is clearly a functional difference. Therefore, contextually, "established by the state"
is ambiguous when compared with the rest of the act, which seems to contemplate no difference between the two exchanges. Therefore, because it's ambiguous, it needs Court interpretation.
3+4) If "Established by the State" really means established by the States and states alone, this law is doomed to failure, thus meaning the phrase "established by the state" is greatly at odds with the rest of the act.
5) Congress wouldn't have intended "established by the state" to destroy the act; therefore, the meaning that doesn't destroy the act is preferred.
It's clear to see that Step 2 is the one that's legally tricky.
