Posted on 06/26/2015 1:18:39 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
So the Supreme Court has upheld the subsidies and taxes under Obamacare in states that did not establish exchanges, despite the text of the law requiring that those subsidies and taxes apply to states that established exchanges. This is not very surprising. We have not been publishing or writing much about the King v. Burwell because I was confident – I thought it was a 1 in 5 shot, and I believe Michael Cannon thought the same – that SCOTUS would uphold the law no matter the facts of the case. In the short run conservatives may feel depressed about today’s ruling. But in the long run I actually think this is probably a huge win for the anti-establishment faction of the party.
Why? Because this SCOTUScare ruling presents an accurate reflection of the reality in Washington: that American politics no longer has real checks and balances. The rules no longer apply. Words mean whatever we say they mean at the time that we say them, neither more nor less. Welcome to the Cartman presidency, where the executive does whatever he wants, up to and including making IRS bureaucrats decide a multi-billion dollar issue. Think the text means exactly what it says? Judicial fiat says lol, jk.
In the context of a nation governed by men and not laws, arguments from the establishment about process, restraint, and the normal give and take of what used to be the American political system for most of the Twentieth Century are going to become weaker and weaker. For the faction that demands dramatic change, the gradualist approach favored by Republican leaders who yearn for the status quo politics of the before time – before the bailouts, before Obama, before the Tea Party – is revealed as a myth.
King v. Burwell targeted subsidies going to a relatively small portion of Obamacare’s beneficiaries (6.5 million subsidized people, many of whom lost coverage they would’ve preferred to keep). The Medicaid portion is really the one aspect of Obamacare that’s working in terms of signing people up, and a King ruling in the other direction would’ve done nothing about that. Those subsidies aren’t working sufficiently – they are not insulating the people on Obamacare from increased costs, including deductibles copays etc. – and with the latest round of cost increases people are going to have more reason to feel like Obamacare isn’t working for them. Had it gone the other way, King would’ve created chaos in just one aspect of Obamacare, and one that is not working well even now.
By losing at the Court, conservatives missed out on a chance for another squishout and for that reason should be breathing a sigh of relief. The hard truth was that the Republican Party was absolutely going to cave on the subsidy question anyway, and do so rapidly, and probably get a bag of basketballs and the medical device tax in exchange. That would’ve both depressed the base and put politicians in an untenable position. Given the certainty of Republicans caving on the subsidies, Obamacare would have emerged with Republican fingerprints all over the idea that we need to be taxing people in order to continue subsidizing able bodied working age adults (as it is, only a handful of Republicans have endorsed that idea). Now Republicans get the added benefit of railing against a law that remains unpopular and that drives health insurance costs ever higher across the country without having to put their legislation where their mouths are.
Finally, this decision is a huge opportunity for Republicans to finally take the health care issue away from Democrats in a serious way. It is not an iron law of politics at all that health care reform remain a Democratic issue any more than education policy or welfare policy. President Obama and the Democrats now own every bad thing about the health care status quo. Much of the coverage that surrounded King v. Burwell was focused on the idea that Republicans were going to own some aspect of Obamacare at the end of it – and I trust that they would have. Every new bad thing under Obamacare is attributable to increased government involvement, which is Democrats’ only remedy going forward as well. This is an opportunity Republicans can capitalize on in a meaningful way in 2016, and it will require candidates willing to do the hard work of preparing to make a comprehensive argument for health care change and defend their plans in the public square.
Thus, I think the ruling today probably increases the likelihood of repealing Obamacare in 2017 by a not insignificant margin.
In other words, they can continue to pretend to be against SCOTUScare even though they are for it and they can keep working to fool the electorate in their pretense. Yeah, I can see what a great advantage that would be for us US Taxpayers. /s
Eight hundred years ago this month, the king of England signed the Magna Carta which placed that country and its king under the rule of law not the rule of King/executive. Now the greatest country on earth has reversed that. We no longer have a nation ruled by laws, but ruled by executive pronouncements.
Contrary to what the writer of this article thinks, I’m not depressed at all. It just means the Lord Jesus is just that much nearer. I am increasingly looking forward to His return.
Republicans? do what? huh? Like that is going to happen.
House GOP leaders and their allies retreated on Thursday, backing off efforts to punish conservative rebels who had bucked leadership on a trade vote.
Oversight Committee Chairman Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) said he was reinstating Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) as a subcommittee chairman, just a week after he stripped him of his gavel for voting against leadership and failing to pay party dues.
And hours earlier, House GOP freshmen balked at a plot to sack their class president, Rep. Ken Buck (R-Colo.), for defying leaders amid complaints he’s been ineffective at his job. All the backpedaling was an embarrassment for GOP leaders, including Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio), who just a day earlier had publicly endorsed Chaffetz’s decision to strip Meadows’s gavel. Both Meadows and Buck are members of the House Freedom Caucus, whose co-founders cheered Thursday’s developments.
“I think what it really means is that maybe our message is finally getting through some very thick skulls,” said one Freedom Caucus co-founder. “When you have a crisis in a family, you don’t exile people, kick people out. You have to communicate better as a family.”
Throughout the week, Freedom co-founders griped to Chaffetz and GOP leaders about Meadows’s removal as chairman. The message was clear: “This is not helpful.”
But it was a GOP conference rule that ultimately helped Meadows win his job back.
In order for Chaffetz to appoint a new chairman of the Oversight Subcommittee on Government Operations, he needed support from a majority of his committee members.
The full panel, however, is stacked with many Freedom Caucus members and their sympathizers, including the group’s chairman, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio); co-founders Reps. Justin Amash (R-Mich.), Ron DeSantis (R-Fla.) and Mick Mulvaney (R-S.C.); Rep. Rod Blum (R-Iowa); Rep. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.), who already experienced some of leadership’s retribution; and Buck, who was targeted by Boehner allies on Thursday.
Those members pressed Chaffetz to reinstate Meadows, threatening to block his efforts to appoint a replacement to lead the subcommittee, GOP sources said.
Chaffetz, also facing an enormous backlash from prominent conservatives like Laura Ingraham and Mark Levin, waved the white flag on Thursday.
“Ultimately, I believe we both want to do what is best for the country,” Chaffetz said in a statement. “Obviously I believe in Mark Meadows or I would not have appointed him to this position in the first place. It is in the best interest of the Committee to move forward together.”
It was a remarkable reversal. Just day earlier, lawmakers and aides close to GOP leadership had estimated that 200-plus House Republicans agreed with the decisions to mete out punishment to conservatives who voted against leadership on rules votes. And several Boehner allies were urging him to be more aggressive in putting down conservative rebellions in the conference.
But Thursday’s action suggested those estimates may be grossly inflated.
“There are people who are not members of the Freedom Caucus who are standing with us and they understand why we're frustrated, and what they want is principled leadership in Washington, and what Speaker Boehner exhibited this week was not principled leadership,” said a second Freedom Caucus leader.
“He’s only listening to a small group of people who are very vocal around him, who don’t reflect the values of the constituents of the Republican Party.”
It's unclear what Thursday's decision will mean for future political retribution. Speaking to reporters, Boehner only focused on downplaying the divisions within the party..............................."
"The Supreme Court’s ruling in King v. Burwell is disappointing. But it also provides a welcome moment of clarity: We can finally dispense with the false belief that the Supreme Court will save us from Obamacare. It is perhaps a blessing for the cause of repeal that all eyes will now turn to the presidential candidates and to Congress, whose job it is to repeal Obamacare in full in early 2017. Accountability is no longer divided. The political branches must act.
It is important to note that the Court’s decision had no relationship to the question of Obamacare’s merits. The case was limited to the question of whether the Obama administration is executing the law as written. The Court says it is. The Court also says, “In a democracy, the power to make the law rests with those chosen by the people.” Indeed, it does. And what was true the day after Obamacare’s passage is equally true today: the law must be repealed.
The reasons are clear: Obamacare consolidates and centralizes money and power to an unprecedented degree. At its core is an (unfixable) individual mandate that requires, for the first time in all of United States history, that private American citizens must buy a product or service of the federal government’s choosing. Its 2,400 pages shift the power over America’s health-care decisions from patients and doctors to bureaucrats and politicians. Instead of offering real reform, it raises health costs, diminishes quality, increases federal spending, raids Medicare, balloons the size of government, and undermines Americans’ liberty.
It was passed as “comprehensive” legislation. It cannot be fixed. It must be repealed — comprehensively.
The citizenry has opposed Obamacare from the start, and yet President Obama and his congressional allies believed the American people would eventually — dutifully — acquiesce. They have not. According to Real Clear Politics, 189 polls have been taken on Obamacare during Obama’s second term. One has found it to be popular; 188 have found it to be unpopular. In the one that found it popular (with 47 percent support), more than three times as many people (31 percent) said it “needs to be repealed in its entirety” as said it “is working well” (9 percent).................."
No silver lining in this one.
A list of those urging Boner to nuke liberty would be helpful going forward, but rounding up the usual suspects could be sufficient. Cantoring some in 2016 would be useful.
No confusion on this now.
This would be true, if and only if, any pubbies had balls, and there are only a couple of them that fit that group.
One hundred years ago Mark Twain said, “If voting made a difference they wouln’t let us do it.”.
Mark Twain was right about a lot of things. Particularly politics. Hard to believe, but the politicians of his time were almost as bad as thosr of our time.
Of course. The difference is that in those days the reach of government was more limited and individuals and states were more jealous of their independence. Ask America's Founders.
From our perspective things seem to be getting worse. I hate to think it could be true but I keep remembering the expression, “it has ever been thus”.
I do believe the federal leviathan really got it’s big boost in response to the corruption of the state level gummints. Think Huey Long. Folks were happy to see Feds with integrity root out the corruption. Who will plow the corrupt in DC under? Seems to me we have to choices, up or down, so to speak. We The People need to do the job before it can be farmed out to a global entity.
Which is why now is the time to remove all symbols of American dissent from the "ugly, racist history of America.
It's not about the Confederacy, it's about dissent
Could you cite which of Twain’s works contains that quotation? I don’t recall it from my reading of Twain, and I’d like to learn the source. Thanks in advance.
so let the REPUBLICANS WHO CONTROL THE PURSE DEFUND IT...
THE OBAMA PLAN WAS TO DUMP THE EXPENSE ON THE STATES...
36 dont have exchanges... but apparently the feds will ahve to pay the subsidies..
IF THE CONSTITUTION WERE IN PLAY THERE WOULD BE NO OBAMACARE IN THE FIRST PLACE.... ROBERTS ESSENTIALLY LEGISLATED FROM THE BENCH.... TWICE
you cant force people to buy a commercial product against their wills... BUT THE “HEALTHCARE” STOCKS ARE BOOMING and they are the CORPORATE SCUMBAGS putting billions in their pockets... the middleman providing NOTHING... two of them the government and the insurance companies... who have done nothing to improve healthcare and driven the costs through the roof.... another sellout of the PEOPLE
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