Posted on 07/25/2014 5:43:06 PM PDT by John Semmens
This past week’s D.C. Court of Appeals panel ruling that customers in the 36 states that didn’t establish their own exchange and use HealthCare.gov instead cannot be given premium tax credits was assailed by the program’s backers as “flagrant judicial activism.”
Presidential Press Secretary Josh Earnest promised that “this insupportable ruling will be ignored. For the Court to insist upon a literal reading of the statute at this late date would unduly hamper the President’s scope of action. He cannot and will not abide having his hands tied by this judicial interference.”
At issue is explicit statutory language in the Affordable Care Act that permits federal subsidies to only those states that set up state healthcare exchanges. Thus far only a third of the states have set up such exchanges. The Obama Administration, though, has been awarding subsidies to all states.
“Millions of people have come to depend on these subsidies,” Earnest pointed out. “To cut them off now on the pretext that there is no statutory authority for the subsidies to two-thirds of the nation places legalistic formalism ahead of human rights. That’s not a legacy the President intends to leave behind.”
“The original intent of legislative language limiting subsidy eligibility was to proffer an incentive for states to set up exchanges,” explained Jonathan Gruber, one of the architects of the legislation. “By dangling a ‘carrot’ of millions of dollars in federal aid in front of the states it was hoped that they’d be induced to take on the task of establishing healthcare exchanges and relieve the federal government of this burden.”
Gruber characterized the original intent as “no longer operative. Obviously, the lure failed to elicit the response desired. Since the fundamental purpose of Obamacare is to establish a comprehensive and uniform health care system a reinterpretation of the statutory history is required. The interpretation that is currently most in line with the President’s objective is that the exclusionary language was a typographical error. In light of the fact that key participants in the process openly acknowledged that they hadn’t read the bill before voting on it I think there is reasonable grounds for a conclusion that it was a typo. And we can’t let a typo impede social justice.”
The Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling this week seemed to bolster Gruber’s reinterpretation. While agreeing with the DC Court that “the plain language of the statute makes a clear distinction on eligibility for federal subsidies” it refused to believe that “such an ill-conceived and stupid ploy aimed at bribing states to set up exchanges should be allowed to wreak negative impacts on the beneficiaries of government’s handouts.”
if you missed any of this week's other semi-news/semi-satire posts you can find them at...
http://azconservative.org/2014/07/25/despicable-anti-clinton-books-should-be-banned/
ping
If this doesn't sound like the ravings of a mad dictator tell me what does?
Aren’t laws “written” so that people can understand what is in them??????? The Lawless One (Clown Prince nobama) doesn’t need no steenkin’ laws, I guess.
Another head shakin’ SHEESH! Thanks john.
No one not 0b0t0mized believes anything from this admin!
“Laws mean what we say they mean, this court is basing its decision on the actual text is outrageous!” one outraged ObamaCare official said “This is the type of judicial tyranny that the founding fathers warned us about! This is a rogue court!”
har, har, har
Thanks for the grins......:-)
Oh, nooooooo, Barry isn't a dictator.
Wipes his butt on the Constitution and even has a drooling idiot lap dog not afraid to tell the public he intends to keep doing it whenever he feels like it.
But, it's not like there's any reason to impeach him.
And yes, I know it’s satire but I also know that’s exactly what Barry intends to do. Ignore the Court ruling.
From the initial court review in 2012 Obama said, if the court overturning Congress’ healthcare reform law it would be a textbook example of “judicial activism” as “conservative commentators” define it: “that an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law.”
You really should file your article as an amicus brief to the court. ;-)
Impeach, Indict, Convict, Imprison the tyrant.
That is the ONLY solution at this point.
Regards
Voters got to know Jonathan Gruber in 2012 when the Obama campaign put the health care policy wonk forward to shut down ObamaCare attacks from Republican nominee Mitt Romney. President Obama was so eager to play up Gruber’s role as a chief architect of ObamaCare because Gruber had been a chief architect of Romney’s state-level health law. Elevating Gruber allowed the campaign to deliver his lines with greater crack: “The core of the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare and what we did in Massachusetts are identical,” says Gruber in one campaign ad. While Gruber may have helped neuter Romney’s ObamaCare attacks, he may end up helping to neuter the law itself thanks to a video unearthed by free-market think tank the Competitive Enterprise Institute.
Gruber, an MIT professor who has become a Democratic health care talking head, also gets paid for talking to industry groups about ObamaCare. In one 2012 speech, Gruber talked about the provision in the law that has state governments administer enrollments, including subsidies. “I think what’s important to remember politically about this is if you’re a state and you don’t set up an exchange, that means your citizens don’t get their tax credits,” said Gruber, a MIT professor, in a speech two years ago. Why is that problematic? Because it directly contradicts what the administration argued in court about a lawsuit that could be “devastating” to ObamaCare because it would end the subsidies paid to enrollees in the states that did not voluntarily comply.
The preferred talking point for pro-administration groups has been to dismiss the subsidy gap as a clerical error, not an intentional policy. It goes like this: Congress meant to provide a way to work around non-compliant states, but didn’t get the wording right. It was, in the words of one administration insider deployed to knock down the court decision, a typo. And who was that insider? You guessed it: Jonathan Gruber. This matters not because it is an embarrassing deception for an academic to be caught in, but because it suggests the falsity of the administration’s claim that this was a glitch and not a feature. The administration was eager to highlight Gruber’s role in order to shame Romney, making it hard now to suggest that he was some peripheral figure. Whether this matters in the expected Supreme Court decision is a matter for the legal eagles to consider, but from a messaging point of view this is a Krakatoa-sized eruption.
http://nation.foxnews.com/2014/07/25/architect-undermines-obamacare
Far more appropriate than "speako," with bonus historical resonance.
Thanks, John.
Another GREAT article destroying Obama’s lie upon lie!
>> a conclusion that it was a typo
Ha. Almost forgot about the infamous typo...
Even satire suffers the intrusiveness of tyranny.
Thanks again for the ping.
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