moe lane:
Which is why the plaintiffs might win.
Background here (via here): the short version is that the Supreme Court has decided to hear arguments onKing v. Burwell (which is effectively the same as Halbig v. Burwell).  For those who don’t remember, the underlying issue is whether Obamacare actually gives the President the ability to provide subsidies to people who use state-sponsored Obamacare exchanges AND the federally-provided one, or whether the law only permits subsidies for users of the state exchanges.  The administration’s defenders, apologists, and sycophants have been arguing that it’s all due to a typo or a technicality… and in the face of somecompelling counter-arguments (and not a few amused head-shakes), including some inadvertent coutner-arguments from those who helped create the legislation in the first place.
Anyway, regarding the actual scope of the case; this is a very important point that was made by Philip Klein. Â Assuming the court found for plaintiffs:
…Instead, [the Supreme Court would] merely be ruling that the administration wasn’t following Obamacare as written.
[snip]
The case now before the court is not making a constitutional claim that Congress doesn’t have the power to pass federal exchange subsidies, but merely that the statute they wrote did not authorize such subsidies
…And the remedy for that claim is very simple. If it truly was the intent of Congress to give the administration the power to provide Obamacare subsidies even in states that did not set up a healthcare exchange, then the Court can simply send the matter back to Congress and have them add whatever authorizations Congress desires to the law. There! Problem solved.
OK, now the major objections.
- Congress won’t give the Obama administration those authorizations! …Well, no, they won’t.  What’s your point?  Think of this as a salutary object lesson in the joys of doing a proper job the first time.  Still think reconciliation is a great way to shove bad law down all our throats?  No?  Imagine my shock.
- Why would the Supreme Court do this? Well, why wouldn’t they?  This is pretty much how things went down with the VRA preclearance case; the courts got tired of waiting for Congress to update what was a steadily more-and-more broken law, so they crossed out the most decayed bits and told the legislature to fix its own mess.  That the legislature decided that it could fix said mess by letting said bits finish decaying is not really the Court’s problem.
There was no split in the lower courts when they accepted Obaman’s misreading of his law.
If the Supreme Court had agreed with the lower courts there would have been no reason for it to bother taking this case up at all.
The proper way to fix this problem, if the Court says it is a problem, is to kick it to CONGRESS and let them rewrite it better this time.
I bet Obama won’t want that.
I guess that shortly we will find out if the administration has some kind of leverage over our CJ.