You fix Cannon and Adler like you do a mutt, but how could Congress, if it actually wanted to solve problems fix a ruling for King and against the government?
I am not a legislative aide, but the following would be a fairly simple and effective fix.
HB. 10000
An ActTo insure that all Americans who qualify for subsidies for health insurance on Healthcare.gov receive the full subsidies to which they are legally eligible for and to clarify that the current Supreme Court majority consists of douchenozzles and fuckwits.
Be it enacted by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled,
Section 1. 42 U.S.C. §18031 shall be amended so that the words “Established by the State” are stricken.
Section 2. For all purposes, including tax calculation and calculation, Section 1 of this Act shall be applied retroactively to 1/1/2014.
That literally is legislative language that would “fix” PPACA from a sociopathic and ahistoric “intrepretation”/rat-fucking. Perhaps, in the interest of comity fuckwits could be replaced with assholes, but that is the modification that I’ll readily concede.
Baud
Yeah, fix is easy. But for the GOP, it’s easier to hurt people and blame Obama.
Betty Cracker
Haha! Well said!
Matt McIrvin
Sadly, this is what makes me think the Court will strike down the subsidies.
If it’s that easy to fix the law, the majority will probably argue that fixing the law is the proper remedy, and that whether Congress is actually willing to do that is a political question of no proper concern to the courts. If they won’t fix it, that’s simply the political consequence of the 2010 and 2014 elections, which the Supreme Court shouldn’t meddle in. And if the 2009 Congress didn’t want a future Republican Congress to get a mulligan, they should have written the law better.
I think that to get an actual fix we’ll have to wait until at least after 2016 (maybe 2020 or 2024), when we can possibly address the political problem. At that point it may be a matter of doing health-care reform all over again.
JGabriel
Richard Mayhew @ Top:
Don’t. Fuckwits is a much funnier word. Also more accurate with respect to Republican intelligence.The only emendation that should be considered might be an additional adjective preceding it, something along the lines of heartless or sociopathic.
[Thoughtful pause.]
Yeah … I think sociopathic fuckwits might be a pretty good description for the GOP in general.
JGabriel
@Baud:
Also more fun – hurting people is how Republicans get their jollies. Like torturing animals, but, you know, with people.
Elizabelle
The Republicans will demand too damaging poison pill to agree to a legislative fix.
It helps them fend off Tea Party challengers at primary time.
It does nothing for people who depend on ACA for health insurance.
Write to Justice Anthony Kennedy pointing out that he cannot assume our legislative chambers, as they exist now, can fix this. Now or in the next few years.
That moron makes too many assumptions. He is living in a world that disappeared 20 or 30 years ago.
Ken
I thought an easier fix was “refer to section X.Y of the original where ‘established by the State’ is defined as including the Federal exchanges.”
Baud
C’mon, Richard. You know damn well the easiest fix of all is single payer!
rikyrah
you tell the truth
rikyrah
Forgot to add,
thanks for the post making it plain to the pony and unicorn Single Payer people
Napoleon
Adler teaches at aw school I went to. I have been waiting for a fund raising call from them since this case was filed to ream them a new one for hiring sociopaths to teach.
gratuitous
I’ll say it again (though I’m not sure if I’ve said it at BJ): Virtually every piece of legislation has some inelegant drafting, and you can eliminate “virtually” when the legislation is something big, like the Affordable Care Act. Different groups of people are working on different sections, and the entire bill doesn’t get to final assembly until just before a vote is taken.
During the drafting process, negotiations over language turn various terms of art and defined terms back and forth and back again. It’s inevitable that not every iteration of a certain principle, like the state exchanges, is going to be properly and effectively changed. The final bill always has some leftover language from a previous draft. Or the word “not” gets left out of a crucial sentence. Or something else.
In a functional legislature (yeah, I know, quit laughing), fixes get implemented on a routine basis through “housekeeping” measures to standardize anomalous language. Or the administrative body that carries out the law writes rules to implement the law that resolves any discrepancies. If there’s a real unresolvable conflict in the language of the law, and the legislative body can’t agree to a fix, then remedial action by a court might be necessary, or a court can rule the legislation of no effect.
We haven’t gone anywhere down that road because we no longer have a functional legislative body. The Supreme Court will, I think, reach whatever conclusion the majority wants (I’m thinking ruling the whole shebang to be unconstitutional and fucking over millions), then backfill some bogus legal mumbo-jumbo (because the plaintiffs don’t want the benefit of guaranteed insurance coverage, nobody can have it), and walk away from the resultant explosion with nary a look back.
azlib
If the Supremes rule the wrong way, we will find out pretty quickly exactly how much political clout the healthcare/industrial complex really has.
We know Congress is pretty much bought and paid for by business interests and a bad ruling on King should interest them a lot.
Tenzil Kem
Dumb question: Can HHS write a regulation that gives ANY state officeholder the power to “create” a state exchange, even if that exchange is a URL that redirects to healthcare.gov? That way any Democratic state treasurer or legislator could set one up in any state.
MomSense
@Baud:
Perry told a NH crowd that a lot of Texans are uninsured and that’s the way they like it.
Patricia Kayden
@Baud: And people are dumb enough to blame Obama. Secretary Clinton needs to run on this.
Mike in NC
@MomSense: We can sell Texas back to Mexico. It’s just a matter of negotiating the best deal.
Kropadope
Isn’t the federal government a state, strictly speaking?
Ruckus
@Mike in NC:
Isn’t any deal the best deal? Fifty cents and a lounge act to be named later would be fine. Now there are a lot of nice people in TX that probably don’t want to become Mexican citizens but there is always a price to pay to live in any particular place.
boatboy_srq
@JGabriel: Heartless fuckwits. If you’re going to go there, might as well go Full Metal Saxon and spare the Latin politesse.
boatboy_srq
@MomSense: @Mike in NC: Interesting article on NPR this morning: there’s a community near Austin that’s actually recognizing that Texans have a problem with race. Near Austin – as in in direct proximity to the People’s Republic of the South. Part of the broadcast covered one couple responding to a “free stuff” posting (craigslist?) who had the cops called on them just for going and picking up stuff offered publicly free of charge because Black and Scary. If the liberal-leaning part of the state acts like this…
@Mike in NC: Mexico will likely remind the US that Texas was created by Ahmurrcans who wanted Texas lands without paying Mexican taxes, following Mexican law or obtaining Mexican citizenship, and who managed to convince the US that all of that was actually a good idea and that such idiot expats were worth defending (while they were squatting on foreign soil, at that). Deal, nothing – it’s unlikely we’ll be able to pay them to take it back.
jl
@Tenzil Kem:
I am very late to this thread and my contribution may be disappointing, since my answer is ‘I don’t know’.
Specifically, I don’t know if an HHS regulation would work.
I have read that a state with an executive branch that wants to keep the subsidies flowing to their federally set up substitute state exchange, with legislation broad enough, could do this voluntarily to remedy a corrupt and absurd politically motivated SCOTUS decision to intentionally misread the legislation and kill the subsidies. And if politically feasible, the state legislature could pass a bill as short and simple as the sample given by RM to permit that. If the insurance industry is very upset by an absurd ruling, they could put pressure on state legislatures to do that.
IANAL, but that is what I have read.
burnspbesq
@Ken:
Oh, you mean what the statute actually says right now?
Does no one understand the meaning of the word “such?”
burnspbesq
Here’s a fairly credible looking analysis of the potential effect of the Supremes throwing out everything we think we know about statutory construction and Chevron.
urban.org/UploadedPDF/2000106-Health-Care-Spending-by-Those-Becoming-Uninsured-if-the-Supreme-Court-…
jl
@burnspbesq: thanks, looks very useful.
Joseph Nobles
My idea was each state with a fed exchange could deem the exchange as established by them for purposes of the subsidies, but that has as much chance of happening as the OP.