The
best analysis of the SCOTUS ruling on the ACA I have read:
Dylan
Matthews at Vox thinks
you need to read only one sentence from the chief justice, near the end.
"Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance
markets, not to destroy them." It's that simple, writes Matthews: The
point of ObamaCare "is to make health insurance markets work better and
cover more people. To change the law so as to make them work worse, Roberts
concluded, is to betray its clear intent."
I was interviewed by U.S.
News & World Report yesterday asking my opinion of the ruling. I said, as
an attorney, I would have been shocked if SCOTUS had ruled otherwise. It is a
longstanding principle of judicial construction of legislation. Judges do not
interpret words in the law as though they are a poem that can be freely
deconstructed divorced from context. Judges are supposed to honor evidence of
legislative intent in construing the meaning of ambiguous or conflicting
language. SCOTUS did just that in this ruling.
