It's also paved with bad intentions.
Was Hoping SCOTUS Would Stick A Dagger Into Obamacare... quite the opposite, sadly
- Thread starter Scataphagos
- Start date
The intent if the law was EXACTLY as it was written and was seen as the way to force State participation. Now after the fact, once everyone is dependent on subsidies that should have never been granted, SCOTUS yields to economic pressure and in an unprecedented move, rewrites law(i.e. unconstitutional) instead of just ruling on it's constitutionally and kicking back to the Legislature to amend.
A Very Sad day for this Country.
Professional or not, he certainly has a point. The court's job is not to rewrite the law.
Here's Scalia's fruitcakery on full display (and a good stfu to him as well):
Here Are The Best (Worst) Lines From Antonin Scalia's Raging SCOTUScare Dissent
Posted: 06/25/2015 10:33 am EDT Updated: 0 minutes ago
"WASHINGTON -- Backers of the Affordable Care Act were treated to twin delights on Thursday: First, the law was upheld, so nobody will be kicked off their insurance by the Supreme Court. And second, the dissent was written by Justice Antonin Scalia who, when angry (which is always), has a penchant for literary drama. "
"Words no longer have meaning," Scalia wrote in the dissent he read from the bench.
"They might not, but that didn't stop Scalia from piling them on top of each other in an angry heap. Here are some of the choicest of his meaningless words. (The attempt by opponents of Obamacare to argue that the law didn't say what it very plainly did say was silly to begin with; that it was rejected means that words do, in fact, have meaning. But this isn't a place to argue with Scalia. Let's just let him rip.)
"Today's interpretation is not merely unnatural; it is unheard of," he wrote. That is, strictly speaking, true, since this was a new case.
"We should start calling this law SCOTUScare."
"This case requires us to decide whether someone who buys insurance on an Exchange established by the Secretary gets tax credits. You would think the answer would be obvious -- so obvious there would hardly be a need for the Supreme Court to hear a case about it," Scalia wrote, again accurately, though not in the way he meant.
"The Court's next bit of interpretive jiggery-pokery..."
"Pure applesauce," he insisted. "Imagine that a university sends around a bulletin reminding every professor to take the 'interests of graduate students' into account when setting office hours, but that some professors teach only undergraduates. Would anybody reason that the bulletin implicitly presupposes that every professor has 'graduate students,' so that 'graduate students' must really mean 'graduate or undergraduate students'? Surely not.'"
"Our only evidence of what Congress meant comes from the terms of the law, and those terms show beyond all question that tax credits are available only on state Exchanges," Scalia writes, forgetting that the people who actually wrote the law were not only available to provide evidence of their intent, but did so."
More >>
Here Are The Best (Worst) Lines From Antonin Scalia's Raging SCOTUScare Dissent
Posted: 06/25/2015 10:33 am EDT Updated: 0 minutes ago
"WASHINGTON -- Backers of the Affordable Care Act were treated to twin delights on Thursday: First, the law was upheld, so nobody will be kicked off their insurance by the Supreme Court. And second, the dissent was written by Justice Antonin Scalia who, when angry (which is always), has a penchant for literary drama. "
"Words no longer have meaning," Scalia wrote in the dissent he read from the bench.
"They might not, but that didn't stop Scalia from piling them on top of each other in an angry heap. Here are some of the choicest of his meaningless words. (The attempt by opponents of Obamacare to argue that the law didn't say what it very plainly did say was silly to begin with; that it was rejected means that words do, in fact, have meaning. But this isn't a place to argue with Scalia. Let's just let him rip.)
"Today's interpretation is not merely unnatural; it is unheard of," he wrote. That is, strictly speaking, true, since this was a new case.
"We should start calling this law SCOTUScare."
"This case requires us to decide whether someone who buys insurance on an Exchange established by the Secretary gets tax credits. You would think the answer would be obvious -- so obvious there would hardly be a need for the Supreme Court to hear a case about it," Scalia wrote, again accurately, though not in the way he meant.
"The Court's next bit of interpretive jiggery-pokery..."
"Pure applesauce," he insisted. "Imagine that a university sends around a bulletin reminding every professor to take the 'interests of graduate students' into account when setting office hours, but that some professors teach only undergraduates. Would anybody reason that the bulletin implicitly presupposes that every professor has 'graduate students,' so that 'graduate students' must really mean 'graduate or undergraduate students'? Surely not.'"
"Our only evidence of what Congress meant comes from the terms of the law, and those terms show beyond all question that tax credits are available only on state Exchanges," Scalia writes, forgetting that the people who actually wrote the law were not only available to provide evidence of their intent, but did so."
More >>
Do you have a problem with plain English?
That's an interesting article, full of poking fun at Scalia and his statements. But it still doesn't alter the fact that the SC doesn't have the right to reword laws to "intent". Just uphold or overturn them as written.
Are you confused over the difference between intent and "plain English"?
I'm not. That's precisely my point.
They're not rewording the law, so far as I know. So your limitation was met, uphold or overturn.