Roberts agreed with the administration’s argument that
the Affordable Care Act was clearly intended to provide tax subsidies to all
Americans who qualify, not just those who bought healthcare coverage on a state
exchange. In his opinion, he wrote that it was "implausible" for
Congress to set up a system in which people who used the federal marketplace were
actually ineligible to get help buying insurance.
To prove his point, Roberts then got a little snarky and used
Scalia’s own words of dissent in the first Obamacare case to come before the
high court in 2012. At that time, Scalia wrote that without subsidies "the
exchanges would not operate as Congress intended." Here's the text of Roberts' remark:
Here’s Vox’s take: “Yup, that's John Roberts quoting the
four conservatives who dissented from the first big Supreme Court health care
case back in 2012. "Without the federal subsidies ... the exchanges would
not operate as Congress intended and may not operate at all," they wrote
at the time. Regardless of the fog thrown up around this since, Roberts seems
to be saying, at one point Congress's intent was well understood.”
Beyond the fact that all those involved in the drafting
of the ACA – Democrats and Republicans – have said the legislative intent was
clear. It should also be pointed out that if the final draft had purposely
limited subsidies to state exchanges, that would sparked a furious debate in
Congress, with Democrats insisting that the same financial assistance was
intended for all, not on a state-by-state basis.
The administration argued that since Obama and Democrats
in Congress sought to extend coverage widely, an interpretation of the law that
denied subsidies to many simply didn't make sense. The phrase
"established by the State," which prompted the legal challenge, was simply
a drafting error that no one noticed for years, the majority of justices
agreed.
Vox nicely summed up the two basic legal precedents that
led to the court’s 6-3 decision on Thursday in King v. Burwell:
Obamacare defense
hinged on two key
legal theories
1. An old principle of common law (deriving ultimately
from Heydon's
Case in the 16th century), which says that particular provisions of a law
must be read in light of the overall purpose of the legislation
2. The 1984 principle of Chevron
deference, according to which the Supreme Court has said that the legal
system should defer to executive agencies' interpretations of statutes unless
they are plainly unreasonable
Both of these legal doctrines, the White House argued,
set the bar low. The Obama administration didn't need to show that their
preferred interpretation of the disputed sentence was the most natural
rendering of the English-language phrase in question. They merely needed to
show that it was one possible reasonable interpretation of the
sentence in light of the overall purpose of the law. So the White House
argued that the overall purpose of the law is, pretty clearly, to give lots of
people subsidized health insurance and that the IRS interpretation is a
reasonable effort to fulfill that purpose.
From the government's viewpoint, the plaintiffs were
positive there was a massive — and extremely strange — conspiracy in which a
Democratic Congress and a Democratic administration designed a scheme whose
purpose was to punish recalcitrant states. Then, once the bill was signed into
law, its architects and supporters all changed their minds so quietly and so
decisively that when the IRS promulgated an interpretation that was contrary to
their initial purpose the only person who raised any objections was a longtime anti-Obamacare fanatic working at a libertarian think
tank.
Here's Roberts, one more time:
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