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The Daily Signal
Top 9 Quotes
From Justice Scalia’s Scathing Dissent in King v. Burwell
Tiffany Bates & Elizabeth Slattery
June 25, 2015
Justice Antonin Scalia is known for his sharp wit and even sharper pen.
He pulled no punches in his dissent today from the Supreme Court’s
decision in King v. Burwell allowing the Obama administration to allow
Obamacare subsidies to flow through the federal exchange.
Here are nine highlights:
1. “We should start calling this law SCOTUScare … [T]his Court’s two
decisions on the Act will surely be remembered through the years … 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.”
2. “This case requires us to decide whether someone who buys insurance
on an Exchange established by the Secretary gets tax credits. You would
think the answer would be obvious—so obvious there would hardly be a
need for the Supreme Court to hear a case about it.”
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3. “Words no longer have meaning if an Exchange that is not established
by a State is ‘established by the State.’”
4. “Under all the usual rules of interpretation, in short, the
Government should lose this case. But normal rules of interpretation
seem always to yield to the overriding principle of the present Court:
The Affordable Care Act must be saved.”
5. “The Court interprets §36B to award tax credits on both federal and
state Exchanges. It accepts that the ‘most natural sense’ of the phrase
‘Exchange established by the State’ is an Exchange established by a
State. (Understatement, thy name is an opinion on the Affordable Care
Act!) Yet the opinion continues, with no semblance of shame, that ‘it
is also possible that the phrase refers to all Exchanges—both State and
Federal. (Impossible possibility, thy name is an opinion on the
Affordable Care Act!)’”
6. “Perhaps sensing the dismal failure of its efforts to show that
‘established by the State’ means ‘established by the State or the
Federal Government,’ the Court tries to palm off the pertinent
statutory phrase as “inartful drafting.’ This Court, however, has no
free-floating power ‘to rescue Congress from its drafting errors.’”
7. “The Court’s decision reflects the philosophy that judges should
endure whatever interpretive distortions it takes in order to correct a
supposed flaw in the statutory machinery. That philosophy ignores the
American people’s decision to give Congress ‘[a]ll legislative Powers’
enumerated in the Constitution. They made Congress, not this Court,
responsible for both making laws and mending them.”
8. “More importantly, the Court forgets that ours is a government of
laws and not of men. That means we are governed by the terms of our
laws, not by the unenacted will of our lawmakers. ‘If Congress enacted
into law something different from what it intended, then it should
amend the statute to conform to its intent.’ In the meantime, this
Court ‘has no roving license … to disregard clear language simply on
the view that … Congress ‘must have intended’ something broader.”
9. “Rather than rewriting the law under the pretense of interpreting
it, the Court should have left it to Congress to decide what to do
about the Act’s limitation of tax credits to state Exchanges.”
Read this and other articles at The Daily Signal
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