Last month's Supreme Court's ruling in King v. Burwell has made it official: There is not a single person in the United States who actually believes Obamacare can work as written. The only question that remains is, who gets to rewrite it?
President Obama thinks he can rewrite it all by himself. With good reason: he has successfully done so ever since has the law was first passed, tweaking a deadline here or increasing spending there. Six Supreme Court justices decreed last month that they can rewrite the law too—you know, to make it work. It seems the only folks in Washington who don't get to rewrite ObamaCare are the majorities in Congress that were elected to repeal it.
In King v. Burwell, four Virginia taxpayers alleged the Obama administration is unlawfully taxing them and 70 million other Americans, as well as unlawfully spending tens of billions of dollars to hide the cost of ObamaCare coverage, contrary to the plain language of the Affordable Care Act.
That statute repeatedly says those taxes and subsidies may be imposed only "through an Exchange established by the State." Nowhere does it authorize them in the dozens of states that failed to establish an exchange, and the federal government established exchanges instead. As has always been the case with Medicaid, Congress offered health care subsidies to a state's residents, but only if state officials agreed to implement the program.
Enter Chief Justice John Roberts. Writing for the majority, Roberts reasoned that, if "established by the State" really meant "established by the State," the ACA would collapse. Roberts found it "implausible" to think Congress would intend to pass a law that might fail.
One wonders whether the Chief Justice has ever seen Congress in action.
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