My condolences to attorneys nationwide. I don’t read lots of laws, but I’d suspect that many of them are ambiguous, not because their drafters are careless but because they are large documents, often amended up to the last minute, often done under deadline, and often with many authors. We have not developed the technology for object-oriented law writing yet.
If the decision had gone the other way, would it have opened the gates for people to examine laws they disagreed with in order to find ambiguity and mistakes, and challenge them on that basis?
i don’t think so. This gives Conservative law makers more opportunity to complain about the ACA and keep it top-of-mind of constituents as we get closer to the presidential election.
Scalia is hopelessly biased, and his dissent here is proof. If he was ever a competent jurist, he isn’t anymore.
Both sides applied ordinary principles of statutory interpretation, they just disagreed about how those principles ought to play out on these facts. I don’t think a contrary result would have had wider effect, nor do I think this result changes the landscape very much.
Naturally, any time the Supreme Court writes a detailed opinion about statutory interpretation, there are subtle shifts in minute parts of how we understand the doctrine. But–at least on my initial skim of the long opinion–there’s nothing major here and wouldn’t have been even if the dissent had its way.
Roberts:
He’s just getting warmed up. Wait till you read his dissent in the SSM case.
This possibility existed before this decision, and it will continue to exist after this decision.
With all the talk leading up to this decision around the fact that one poorly-written sentence could potentially bring Obamacare crashing down, is it fair to say that one word (“such”) actually saved it?
Missed the edit window. The quote is from p.20 of the decision, at the end of section II.C. of Roberts’ opinion.
No, I’m gonna go with Roberts’ calling bullshit on the plaintiffs’ argument in the passage I quoted in post 25.
Fat Tony (aka “supreme court justice”) with his “Pure Applesauce” / “SCOTUScare” / “jiggery-pokery” (WTF?) dissent, pretty much saved the Repub’s from themselves. Now they can hem & haw against judicial tyrrany (I think Huckabee has already said that).
Roberts on the majority surprised me. He’s got some long game strategy I reckon.
It’s certainly an important word. Hard to say whether the majority would have gone the same way without it.
But the sentiment captured by the majority is mostly just that the proper way to interpret a statute is to read each of the words in appropriate context. Both sides agree with that in principle, but differ as a matter of degree as to how much the context has to be clear to overwhelm the context-free interpretation of a phrase. ISTM that this notion, that you cannot tell what a word really means unless you read an entire paragraph, or many paragraphs, is upsetting to folks with a certain temperament on a fundamental level. There’s a certain kind of person that just doesn’t really grok that concept because it feels a little post-modern, like we’ve lost our bearings if meaning is so fluid.
The word here might be ‘such’ but I have a feeling the word in the White House tonight will be ‘legacy’ <insert Biden quote>.
Most surprising to me is that by not basing the decision on Chevron deference, the next Republican president will not be able to simply order the IRS to apply the rule differently, at least as far as I understand it.
The Supreme Court was not asked to consider whether the subsidies applied to non-state exchanges the last time they reviewed the ACA. The sections in question were undoubtedly ambiguous. Even I, as an Obama-cheerin’ liberal, cannot dispute that.
Well, there is one thing I think is new: Roberts second-guessing whether Congress would have delegated the authority to interpret the relevant sections to the IRS rather than (presumably) the Department of Health & Human Services. As far as I can recall, no SCOTUS decision weighed the likelihood that a particular agency would be properly charged with interpretation of a statutory scheme (though there are obviously lots about whether a particularly agency was actually charged with doing so.)
I am not sure I buy that reasoning, since the subsidies are, after all, a matter of tax policy.
Yeah, that’s interesting. I guess I don’t know enough about Chevron to say how new that idea is.
But still at most tea leaves as to how Roberts would rule in the future, right, since that lost comment is dicta?
Reportedly Roberts was laughing through Scalia’s reading of his dissent. If there were ever any thoughts that he’d be another reliable regressive vote for decades, they should be gone now.
Here’s an article from Slate.com that has the last two paragraphs of Roberts’ that pretty clearly delineates why he went the way he did. I’d post the actual text, but it is in image-form in the article. Some of this has already been stated, but I thought showing his exact wording would be helpful.
It’s the right way for SCOTUS to do things, in my very non-lawyer opinion. Gives me hope on future things, it does 
Especially with the guy who wrote the law on tape saying it was meant to be that way.
I guess this takes the issue off the plate for 2016.
The views of the guy who wrote the law are irrelevant. He isn’t a legislator. We don’t look at the views of lobbyists when we interpret laws either.
I’m not sure it’s dicta. You can read it as “Congress didn’t delegate this duty, and by the way they wouldn’t have done it that way anyway.” I read it as “Congress didn’t delegate this duty, which is clear because the IRS would not have been the appropriate agency for such delegation.”