“…Chief Justice Roberts has now become a co-conspirator in this executive law-making. With the verve of a legislator, he has effectively amended the statute to read “established by the State—or by the way the Federal Government.” His opinion—joined by the four liberal Justices and Anthony Kennedy—is all the more startling because it goes beyond normal deference to regulators.
Chief Justice Roberts concedes that the challengers’ arguments “about the plain meaning” of the law “are strong.” But then he writes that Congress in its 2010 haste bypassed “the traditional legislative process” and thus “the Act does not reflect the type of care and deliberation that one might expect of such significant legislation.”So because ObamaCare is a bad law, the Court must interpret it differently from other laws.
More to the political point, the Chief argues that withdrawing the subsidies would undermine larger ObamaCare goals such as giving “certain people tax credits to make insurance more affordable” and could lead to bad policy consequences like higher costs. “It is implausible that Congress meant the Act to operate in this manner,” he writes…”
“No, seriously; nobody could have meant to draft legislation this poorly written!”
Then again, Reagan appointed Anthony Kennedy, though in a moment of uncharacteristic weakness after Liberals invented “Borking”.
Best of the Web wonders, in light of what’s now become…
“…The majority acknowledges that the ObamaCare is a bit of a mess, or, as Roberts understatedly puts it, that it “contains more than a few examples of inartful drafting”:
“Several features of the Act’s passage contributed to that unfortunate reality. Congress wrote key parts of the Act behind closed doors, rather than through “the traditional legislative process.” And Congress passed much of the Act using a complicated budgetary procedure known as “reconciliation,” which limited opportunities for debate and amendment, and bypassed the Senate’s normal 60-vote filibuster requirement. As a result, the Act does not reflect the type of care and deliberation that one might expect of such significant legislation.“
Scalia’s answer:
“It is not our place to judge the quality of the care and deliberation that went into this or any other law. . . . Much less is it our place to make everything come out right when Congress does not do its job properly. It is up to Congress to design its laws with care, and it is up to the people to hold them to account if they fail to carry out that responsibility.“
As Joel Gehrke notes over at NRO, Scalia held nothing back in his ardent dissent:
“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.”
Liberalism is a disease; Roberts is simply one of the symptoms.
All we can say is, enjoy your new friends, John:
Oh,…and though we’d like to express the hope Roberts burns in Hell, wishing this power-mad popinjay roasts in the everlasting and unquenchable fires of the nether regions is perhaps a mite uncharitable. So we’ll settle for having…
“…The fact that many people arestillprepared to vote for Hillary Clinton to be President of the United States, in times made incredibly dangerous by the foreign policy disasters on her watch as Secretary of State, raises painful questions about this country.
A President of the United States — any president — has the lives of more than 300 million Americans in his or her hands, and the future of Western civilization. If the debacles and disasters of the Obama administration have still not demonstrated the irresponsibility of choosing a president on the basis of demographic characteristics, it is hard to imagine what could…”
We hope…and fervently pray…the sordid story of this sorry shyster is finally, blessedly, coming to an end.
Speaking of history, or perhaps more properly, the inaccurate chronicling thereof, the WSJ‘s Bret Stephens details…
“The New York Times recently featured a photo and video essay by the celebrated photojournalist David Guttenfelder titled “Illuminating North Korea.” It’s a potent reminder that nothing is so blinding as the illusion of seeing.
I don’t mean to disparage Mr. Guttenfelder’s photographic skills or his sincerity. But what are we to make of a photo essay heavy on pictures of modern-looking factories and well-fed children being fussed over in a physical rehabilitation center? Or—from his Instagram account (“Everyday DPRK”)—of theme-park water slides, Christian church interiors, well-stocked clothing stores and rollerblading Pyongyang teens—all suggesting an ordinariness to North Korean life that, as we know from so many sources, is a travesty of the terrifying truth?
…Even more acute has been the generally hidden censorship of reporters covering the Palestinians.During last year’s war in Gaza, the Foreign Press Association in Israel issued a statement denouncing “the blatant, incessant, forceful and unorthodox methods employed by the Hamas authorities and their representatives against visiting international journalists in Gaza.”
The statement was all the more impressive given that self-censorship has long been the norm for Western reporters covering the Palestinians, when it’s not outright fellow traveling.But aside from these rare moments of candor, readers rarely appreciate that their understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is fundamentally skewed by the fact that news from Israel is reported freely and fiercely, while news from the Palestinian territories comes filtered through lenses of ideology and fear.
…Sorry to break it to Mr. Guttenfelder, but a pretense of openness is the way by which totalitarian regimes have always enlisted useful idiots into doing their bidding. One in four North Korean children suffer from chronic malnutrition. The regime holds some 200,000 political prisoners in its gulag, in which, according to a U.N. inquiry, “the inmate population has been gradually eliminated through deliberate starvation, forced labour, executions, torture, rape.”
Needless to say, none of this crosses Mr. Guttenfelder’s lens. In making the regime seem almost normal, he invites us to forget what it is.Whatever that is, it isn’t journalism.“
Boys and girls, can you say “Walter Duranty“?!? We KNEW you could!
Turning back for a moment to the world of twisted Liberal law, as the WSJ reports, in the not-too-distant future, if you’re…
“…On May 20 the American Law Institute approved, by a very close vote, significant changes to the section of its new Restatement of Torts dealing with assault and battery. The changes will have far-reaching, and extremely troubling, social and legal ramifications—including favoring some religious beliefs over others.
The institute’s restatement defines the tort of battery as any contact with another person that “offends a reasonable sense of personal dignity” or—the new addition—contact that is highly offensive to another person’s “unusually sensitive sense of personal dignity, and the actor knows that the contact will be highly offensive to the other.”
To be a battery, the contact or touching must be offensive. That’s to exclude the occasional bumps we experience walking through a crowd. And the law always measured what constituted an offense based on the views of a reasonable person.That way a judge can dismiss a frivolous claim. However, the American Law Institute now proposes that personal contact is a tort if the defendant knows that it will be offensive to someone who is “unusually sensitive.”
This is dangerous…Tort law focuses on the “reasonable person” because most people want a standard that treats people alike. Consider John Doe, waiting at a bus stop, who taps a woman wearing a Muslim veil on the shoulder to get her attention and ask for directions. The institute’s restatement suggests that Mr. Doe might be liable for committing battery. A jury might find that a reasonable person would know that males aren’t supposed to make bodily contact with females not in their family. But if the woman touches Mr. Doe, she’s not liable, because he follows a different religion or no religion at all.
The new tort rule, in short, favors one religion over others…”
No doubt providing John Roberts yet another reason to celebrate tonight.
“Sitting in his surgical gown inside a large medical suite in Reston, Va., a Vienna man prepared for his colonoscopy by pressing record on his smartphone, to capture the instructions his doctor would give him after the procedure. But as soon as he pressed play on his way home, he was shocked out of his anesthesia-induced stupor: He found that he had recorded the entire examination and that the surgical team had mocked and insulted him as soon as he drifted off to sleep.
…“After five minutes of talking to you in pre-op,” the anesthesiologist told the sedated patient, “I wanted to punch you in the face and man you up a little bit,” she was recorded saying.
When a medical assistant noted the man had a rash, the anesthesiologist warned her not to touch it, saying she might get “some syphilis on your arm or something,” then added, “It’s probably tuberculosis in the penis, so you’ll be all right.”
When the assistant noted that the man reported getting queasy when watching a needle placed in his arm, the anesthesiologist remarked on the recording, “Well, why are you looking then, retard?”…”
This is one case in which a simple “Have you ever seen such an as*hole?!?” not only would have sufficed, but more than likely would have proved defensible in court!
And since we mentioned arrogant as*holes, it’s time for today’s Environmental Moment, and this report from the Washington Examiner on the profligate spending habits of John Roberts’ newest, bestest buddy:
“President Obama’s decision to take his Earth Day speech attacking climate change “deniers” to Florida, home of two GOP presidential candidates, cost taxpayers $866,615.40 just for the flight of Air Force One.
Taxpayer watchdog Judicial Watch revealed Wednesday that the Air Force provided documents showing the flight expenses of flying the jumbo jet 4.2 hours to Miami. He was then helicoptered 20 minutes to the Florida Everglades for his speech.
Other costs, such as security, communications and staff were not provided, but would put the speech price at way over $1 million…”
“Way over” is an understatement…a gross understatement. But hey, at least hyper-hypocrite and noted climate-scammer Bill Nye…
…got to ride on gas-guzzling Air Force One! Besides, Barry bankrupting the country is just another consequence of the people’s political choices, and thus undeserving of protection.
Which brings us to the Lighter Side:
We’ll be taking a brief respite Upstate New York for our Dad’s memorial golf tournament, so will likely be radio silent until Friday.
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