James Geraghty of National Review Online fame writes today in his Morning Jolt column with the same trepidation we had about yesterday’s Obamacare decisions (also iterated in our comment section by Gus):
Obamacare Will Probably Bounce Back with an ‘En Banc’ Decision
Call me a cynic about this latest court defeat for Obamacare, but it’s hard to be cheery when the Department of Justice is going to seek an “en banc” decision from the D.C. Court of Appeals. With an 8 to 5 majority of Democrat-appointed judges, that court is so eager to let Obama have it his way, it might as well install a drive-through lane. “Yeah, can I get a reinstatement of all subsidies and a side of fries?”
Heritage’s Hans von Spakovsky says it’s going to the Supreme Court:
While the U.S. Supreme Court accepts only about 1 percent of the cases seeking its review, it’s now roughly 100 percent guaranteed that the Court will take up these two cases. The obvious conflict created in the federal circuits by Tuesday’s rulings must be resolved quickly, simply because the stakes are so high. The subsidy issue involves enormous amounts of money and is critical to the administration of a major portion of Obamacare.
Ah, the Supreme Court . . . where Chief Justice John Roberts has already given a thumbs-up to the individual mandate and subsequently wrote the Hobby Lobby decision to be as narrowly-tailored as possible. Maybe I’m crazy, but it looks like Roberts desperately wants to avoid going down in history as The Man Who Killed Obamacare — knowing that he’ll be relentlessly demonized by liberal law professors and legal historians for the rest of time. If Roberts is given more opportunities, he’ll try to do as little damage as possible — not so much because he thinks Obamacare is such a great idea, but because he thinks its proper remedy should come from the legislative and executive branches.
No, if Obamacare is going to be repealed, removed, nullified, canceled, or functionally ignored, it’s going to be up to us. We can’t count on the Supreme Court to save us.
On the other hand . . .
Roberts has said, words to the effect, that it is not the courts job to overturn wrong political decisions. OK the plain reading of the statute says only the states that signed up for the exchanges are eligible for subsidies (that was their incentive to set up exchanges). Thirty-six didn’t take the bait. By his own reasoning Roberts should not protect the Congress or Obama from their poor anticipation of outcomes.
More reading regarding the matter is available in this Bloomberg News article.
