Friday, June 26, 2015

What I’m Reading: Vox



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. 
 
 
 

Sunday, June 7, 2015

What I'm Reading: The New York Times



There is a virus afflicting perception so pervasive that we no longer recognize healthy, unaffected perception--it is the red versus blue virus. I have written about it previously. There were so many more productive ways to look at the data but this writer chose a red/blue lens. Our lives are 99% biological and cultural and 1% political; yet, we let our politics define and divide us.