Scalia Slams Roberts as Biased In Obamacare Cases

In a blistering dissent from the majority in King v. Burwell this morning, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said President Obama’s signature domestic policy achievement should be called “SCOTUScare” rather than Obamacare, in light of how many times Chief Justice John Roberts has intervened to protect the law from a crippling legal defeat.

Scalia argued that Roberts rewrote the law twice in 2012, and has now done so a third time in his King decision, which allows the IRS to continue providing subsidies to people who purchase insurance in the federal government’s health-care exchange.

“The somersaults of statutory interpretation they have performed (‘penalty’ means tax, ‘further [Medicaid] payments to the State’ means only incremental Medicaid payments to the State, ‘established by the State’ means not established by the State) will be cited by litigants endlessly, to the confusion of honest jurisprudence,” Scalia wrote in his dissent. “And the cases will publish forever the discouraging truth that the Supreme Court of the United States favors some laws over others, and is prepared to do whatever it takes to uphold and assist its favorites.”

Just ponder the significance of the Court’s decision to take matters into its own hands. The Court’s revision of the law authorizes the Internal Revenue Service to spend tens of billions of dollars every year in tax credits on fed - eral Exchanges. It affects the price of insurance for mil - lions of Americans. It diminishes the participation of the States in the implementation of the Act. It vastly expands the reach of the Act’s individual mandate, whose scope depends in part on the availability of credits. What a parody today’s decision makes of Hamilton’s assurances to the people of New York: “The legislature not only com - mands the purse but prescribes the rules by which the duties and rights of every citizen are to be regulated. The judiciary, on the contrary, has no influence over . . . the purse; no direction . . . of the wealth of society, and can take no active resolution whatever. It may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL but merely judgment.” The Federalist No. 78, p. 465 (C. Rossiter ed. 1961).

Having transformed two major parts of the law, the Court today has turned its attention to a third. The Act that Congress passed makes tax credits available only on an “Exchange established by the State.” This Court, however, concludes that this limitation would prevent the rest of the Act from working as well as hoped. So it rewrites the law to make tax credits available everywhere. We should start calling this law SCOTUScare.

Perhaps the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act will attain the enduring status of the Social Security Act or the Taft-Hartley Act; perhaps not. But this Court’s two decisions on the Act will surely be remembered through the years. The somersaults of statutory interpretation they have performed (“penalty” means tax, “further [Medi-caid] payments to the State” means only incremental Medicaid payments to the State, “established by the State” means not established by the State) will be cited by litigants endlessly, to the confusion of honest jurisprudence. And the cases will publish forever the discouraging truth that the Supreme Court of the United States favors some laws over others, and is prepared to do whatever it takes to uphold and assist its favorites.
I dissent.

Thank you Justice Scalia. We're not in Kansas anymore Dorothy.

-— “The somersaults of statutory interpretation they have performed (‘penalty’ means tax, ‘further [Medicaid] payments to the State’ means only incremental Medicaid payments to the State, ‘established by the State’ means not established by the State) -—

Up is down. Square is round.

The last fiber of cable tethering the law has snapped. The law is floating freely away from reality or the natural law.

Thanks for refreshing everyone’s memory regarding Roberts shady and illegal adoption of his 2 kids. My good friend when looking to adopt children, first looked at Ireland and she says a child literally had to be designated as an orphan to be adoptable. So if Roberts’ kids had parents that were still alive, the Roberts’ adoption of his kids was illegal. My friend says adopting kids from Ireland is nigh on impossible. Hence the adoption of his 2 kids takes place in South America, a very odd and SUSPECT arrangement indeed. In other words illegal. Blackmail, pure and simple.

I have zero sympathy for Roberts. An honorable man would recuse himself or resign.

I also have zero sympathy for him. If he's not being blackmailed then he's a corrupt, politicized hack impersonating a judge. And if he is being blackmailed, well, he made his bed.

I will say this though, it would be a real rookie move to blackmail a guy at this level and not make it clear that if he talks or tries to resign, it all comes out immediately. You don't hook a fish that big and then give him an escape route unless you're an amateur. And let's face it, Obama's camp are not amateurs at thug tactics.

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