The Obamacare Federal-exchange-subsidies plot just thickened a bit, with the discovery online of video of one of the Affordable Care Act’s architects, Jonathan Gruber, explaining in 2012, that the exclusion of Federal health-care exchanges from eligibility for IRS subsidies was no bug, but a feature. Its purpose, Gruber explained, was to pressure the states to set up their own exchanges.
This clearly contradicts — pulls the rug right out from under, you might say — the 4th Circuit’s reasoning in its decision allowing IRS subsidies to continue, and Gruber is now backpedaling hard. His explanation “was just a speak-o”, he said, “…you know, like a typo.”
Yeah, right. More here.
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I’ll refrain from commenting on the patently absurd argument that ACA was written with a poison pill to unravel it once it was implemented, except to note that your long-lost cousin Harold feels differently:
http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-07-25/sabotaging-obamacare-even-if-it-hurts
In case you would like to see why other language in the bill makes the legal argument moot – pulls the rug right out from under, you might say – you can find it here:
http://balkin.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-legally-flawed-rearguard-challenge.html
It wasn’t intended to unravel it; it was a way of pushing the states to opt in. Jonathan Gruber explained it this way, with perfect clarity, on multiple occasions, and now it looks like we also have Max Baucus on video doing the same.
It would have been trivial to explicitly include federal exchanges in the subsidies; instead, it seems very clear that it was done the way it was for a reason. (Do you really doubt this?) Now that the pressure on the states has failed to achieve the desired result, supporters of the law want to pretend it was all just a misunderstanding.
Sorry, you don’t get to have it both ways.
See also here.
The final say, of course, will be with SCOTUS.
For the “equality under the law” category;
http://news.msn.com/us/satanists-troll-hobby-lobby-1