The Supreme Court has ruled. Obamacare stands. But Steve DiMarzo isn’t happy and feels that only champions of insanity and inanity like Ted Cruz and Antonin Scalia can save us from decline.
Ted Cruz is an amusing sideshow, but Scalia serves on the bench, so let’s take a look at the ruling that DiMarzo mentions in his letter.
In summarizing “King et al. versus Burwell” for the majority, Justice Roberts wrote:
“The Act gives each State the opportunity to establish its own Exchange, but provides that the Federal Government will establish ‘such Exchange’ if the State does not. (42 U.S.C. §§180 31, 18041).”
Under the Act, states were to get the first shot at establishing their own exchanges but in their absence a federal exchange would provide similar services. Despite quibbling over some wording, the Supreme Court majority upheld Congress:
“Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them. If at all possible, we must interpret the Act in a way that is consistent with the former, and avoids the latter. Section 36B can fairly be read consistent with what we see as Congress’s plan, and that is the reading we adopt.”
Writing for the minority dissent, however, Justice Antonin Scalia could barely contain his anger and demonstrated that he is a man with seriously disordered thought.
Scalia excoriates the majority, calling its ruling “absurd,” that “words no longer have meaning,” that the majority’s ruling exhibits “no semblance of shame.” He argues hotly that the Secretary of Health and Human Services is not a state. (But of course neither are the governmental officials running our Massachusetts exchange.) Scalia also completely ignores the legitimacy of the federal exchange and only recognizes state exchanges. Ultimately all he can do is sputter and call the majority’s opinion “pure applesauce.”
Scalia then slams the tax credits by which the federal-state partnership works as the majority’s “interpretive jiggery-pokery,” proving that for Scalia himself words truly have no meaning. What does his bizarre expression even mean? And why are the Affordable Care Act’s complex tax provisions any more objectionable than the rest of a tax code that privileges corporations and the extremely wealthy?
And if Scalia is such a keen and literal reader of the Constitution, why are corporations now considered to be people? Why does he not scrupulously support Fourth Amendment rights regarding personal “effects” and the unequivocal requirements for warrants? Why doesn’t Scalia read the Second Amendment as referring not to individual rights to bear arms but the collective right to establish militias?
Or could it be that the Justice has applesauce between his ears?
Speaking recently at his granddaughter’s graduation, Scalia remarked, “Humanity has been around for at least some 5,000 years or so.” Actually humanity has been around for at least a hundred thousand – and longer if we include our close human relatives.
Here is a man divorced from reality, ignorant or antipathetic to science, an angry, inconsistent, ideologue given to incoherent argument and babbling. Scalia is a walking example of precisely WHY the Court is in decline and an argument for the need to have term limits on Supreme Court justices – or at least to be able to recall those unfit for service.
So if Steve DiMarzo wants to recommend someone to save the country – he’d better keep looking.
This was published in the Standard Times on July 3, 2015
http://www.southcoasttoday.com/article/20150703/opinion/150709802