A few additional broader thoughts on the Court’s King v. Burwell ruling today. First, technically, this is not an administrative law ruling. That is, the Court did not apply so-called Chevron deference and thereby uphold the IRS’s reading of the relevant Affordable Care Act’s provision. But practically, it comes to the same thing. In both cases, a provision that makes tax credits available to eligible individuals who buy insurance on exchanges “established by the State” is read to mean that those credits are also available to individuals who buy on exchanges established by the federal government.
Rather, this is a statutory ruling—as if the IRS had never interpreted that provision and the Court were doing so as a matter of first impression. And the tangled web the Court weaves in reading “established by the State” as meaning “established by the State or by the federal government” is reduced to shreds by Justice Scalia’s devastating dissent. It is a tour de force that must be read.
Toward the end of his dissent, however, Scalia waxes more broadly, on the proper roles of Congress and the Court. “Our task,” he writes, “is to apply the text, not to improve upon it.” “Rather than rewriting the law under the pretense of interpreting it, the Court should have left it to Congress to decide what to do about the Act’s limitation of tax credits to state Exchanges.” “The Court’s insistence on making a choice that should be made by Congress both aggrandizes judicial power and encourages congressional lassitude.” And he concludes this important section of his dissent with Hamilton in Federalist No. 78: “What a parody today’s decision makes of Hamilton’s assurances [that the Court has] ‘neither FORCE nor WILL but merely judgment.’”
Read more at http://www.cato.org/blog/court-today-once-deferential-activist
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