Criticizing my recent post-mortem on King v. Burwell, Scott Lemieux kindly calls me “ObamaCare’s fiercest critic” for my role in that ObamaCare case. Other words he associates with my role include “defiant,” “ludicrous,” “farcical,” “dumber,” “snake oil,” “ludicrous” (again), “irrational,” “aggressive,” “comically transparent,” and “dishonest.”
Somewhere amid the deluge, Lemieux reaches his main claim, which is that (somehow) I admitted: “the King lawsuit wasn’t designed to uphold the statute passed by Congress in 2010. It was intended to ‘enfranchise’ the people who voted against the bill.” I’m not quite sure what Lemieux means. But perhaps Lemieux doesn’t understand my point about how the Supreme Court helped President Obama disenfranchise his political opponents.
As all nine Supreme Court justices acknowledged in King, “the most natural reading of the pertinent statutory phrase” is that Congress authorized the Affordable Care Act’s premium subsidies, employer mandate, and (to a large extent) individual mandate only in states that agreed to establish a health-insurance “Exchange.” That is, all nine justices agreed that the plain meaning of the operative statutory language allows states to veto key provisions of the ACA—sort of like the Medicaid veto that has existed for 50 years and lets states destroy health insurance for millions of poor Americans. The Exchange veto includes the power to shield millions of state residents from the ACA’s least-popular provisions: the individual mandate and the employer mandate.
Read more at http://www.cato.org/blog/king-v-burwell-how-supreme-court-helped-president-obama-disenfranchise-political-opponents
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