… as the New York Times stamps its tiny feet in anger:
Republicans hate activist judges — those black-robed elites who are willing to upset the lives of millions of people just to further a political cause. Ditto trial lawyers trolling for clients, the ambulance-chasing, “Better Call Saul” guys. They hate them, until they need them.
And in the raw power play that is behind the attempt to kick millions of people off health care gained through the Affordable Care Act, Republicans are attempting one of the most brazen manipulations of the legal system in modern times. To pull it off, they’re relying on a toxically politicized judiciary to make law, and to make a mockery of everything that conservative legal scholars profess to believe.
What’s the rumpus, you ask? Merely the dreaded King v. Burwell case heading for arguments in the Supreme Court. Because the illegal law was passed via subterfuge and procedural trickeration, it’s only karmic that it was also poorly drafted, which is the hub of the matter:
And so it comes down to this: a legal challenge based on a technicality — specifically, four words. Should subsidies be available only to exchanges “established by the states”? Or were they designed to cover the entire nation, as is obvious in the intent of the law?
The Supreme Court case, to be decided by June, grew out of a gathering in 2010 of far-right attorneys looking for a way to destroy Obamacare.
“This bastard has to be killed as a matter of political hygiene,” said Michael S. Greve, a former chairman of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, during a panel discussion. “I don’t care how this is done, whether it’s dismembered, whether we drive a stake through its heart, whether we tar and feather it and drive it out of town, whether we strangle it.”
And your problem with that is…?
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