Vox - King v. Burwell: Obamacare subsidies upheld by Supreme Courthttps://cdn.vox-cdn.com/community_logos/52517/voxv.png2015-06-27T11:10:02-04:00http://www.vox.com/rss/stream/56904302015-06-27T11:10:02-04:002015-06-27T11:10:02-04:00Is the Supreme Court more liberal? Or are the cases more conservative?
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<p>A few days before the Obamacare and <a href="http://www.vox.com/cards/gay-marriage-supreme-court-decision" target="_blank">same-sex marriage</a> cases dropped, the New York Times published a fascinating data analysis <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/06/23/upshot/the-roberts-courts-surprising-move-leftward.html?_r=0&abt=0002&abg=1" target="_blank">showing</a> that the Supreme Court was on track to have one of the most liberal terms in years.</p>
<p>But is the Court getting more liberal or are the cases getting more conservative?</p>
<p>The Times' analysis relies on <a target="_blank" href="http://scdb.wustl.edu/">the Supreme Court Database</a>, which codes whether decisions are liberal or conservative (an explanation of their approach to doing this is <a target="_blank" href="http://scdb.wustl.edu/documentation.php?var=decisionDirection">here</a>.) But while this kind of analysis can tell you whether the Court is finding more often for the pro-affirmative action side, or for the pro-choice side, or for unions, it can't tell you why — and that makes it hard to say whether the Court really has become more liberal or more conservative.</p>
<p><span>So imagine a finding that the court is ruling for affirmative action more often. One reason might be that the Court has become more liberal on affirmative action cases. Another reason might be that the Court has become more conservative, and so is hearing challenges to affirmative action laws that it wouldn't even have considered in past terms, even though it is ultimately siding with the status quo.</span></p>
<p><span>In that case, it might look like the Court is getting more liberal, as it is ruling for the pro-affirmative action side, but it would actually be getting more conservative.</span></p>
<p>In a post at <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/26/upshot/supreme-court-liberal-drift-v-conservative-overreach.html?partner=rss&emc=rss">the Upshot</a>, Brendan Nyhan outlines some research that suggests more conservative Supreme Courts take more conservative cases, and so can end up leading to more liberal-looking rulings:</p>
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<p>In a 2009 article, the political scientists Kevin T. McGuire, Georg Vanberg, Charles E. Smith Jr. and Gregory A. Caldeira <a href="http://mcguire.web.unc.edu/files/2014/01/policy_content.pdf">proposed</a> a theory that provides an alternate explanation to liberal drift. They predicted that conservatives would press their luck to take advantage when they had a majority on the court, appealing more cases they lost in lower courts. (Conversely, liberals would be less likely to appeal cases because they were more likely to prefer lower-court decisions and to fear creating damaging precedents.)</p>
<p>Mr. McGuire and his co-authors then showed empirically that this process increased the number of conservative reversals of lower-court rulings but also increased the number of cases in which a more liberal ruling was affirmed because litigants guessed wrong about how far the court was willing to go.</p>
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<p>In other words, when conservatives have a majority on the Supreme Court, they send more conservative cases to the Supreme Court — and so, naturally, they end up losing more cases before the Supreme Court, which makes the Court look more liberal.</p>
<p>The Obamacare ruling is a good example. One way to read the outcome of that case is that the Court sided with liberals, and that's evidence of a more liberal term. But another way to read that case is that it only made it to the Supreme Court because the Court has become so conservative — any other Court wouldn't have bothered, and so the proper interpretation is that <em>King v. Burwell</em> is evidence of the Court's conservatism. Nyhan quotes Eric Citron, a former Supreme Court clerk, <a href="http://live.scotusblog.com/Event/Live_blog_of_opinions__June_25_2015/169907436">making exactly this point</a>:</p>
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<p>This [decision] is a good example of what’s problematic with the proposition that this is a "liberal" term. On the one hand, this is a huge victory for the left wing of the Court on a contentious issue; on the other hand, this issue does not get granted with a less conservative Court. It all depends on your baseline.</p>
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<p>But there's another thing all these measurements miss: the importance of various rulings. The same-sex marriage ruling is a liberal ruling of enormous, even historic, magnitude. The scores will count it as one case, equal to any other case, but it isn't — and its presence alone will ensure that liberals long remember this Court.</p>
<p>Most Supreme Court decisions, after all, don't get this reaction from the other branches of government:</p>
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<p><b>Correction:</b> I misunderstood the methodology behind the Supreme Court Database when I first read it. I read it as relying on Segal-Cover and Martin-Quinn scores to come to its conclusions as to which rulings are liberal and which are conservative. In fact, it's the reverse: Segal-Cover and Martin-Quinn scores used the Supreme Court Database's coding to ground their conclusions. Thanks to the NYT's <a target="_blank" href="https://twitter.com/jeremybowers/status/614819258464210944">Jeremy Bowers</a> for walking me through this. The text has been updated throughout.</p>
https://www.vox.com/2015/6/27/8856465/supreme-court-liberalEzra Klein2015-06-26T09:40:02-04:002015-06-26T09:40:02-04:00How Amelia Bedelia explains Obamacare’s last Supreme Court challenge
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<p>Nicholas Bagley, an assistant law professor at University of Michigan, has an amazing <a href="http://www.latimes.com/opinion/op-ed/la-oe-0626-bagley-king-burwell-20150626-story.html">analogy</a> to help understand <em>King v. Burwell</em>, the Supreme Court case<a href="http://www.vox.com/2015/6/15/8779143/obamacare-repeal-dead-supreme-court"> decided yesterday </a>upholding Obamacare's insurance subsidies:</p>
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<p>The plaintiffs' position has always reminded me of an old Amelia Bedelia story. When the literal-minded but bighearted housekeeper is told by her employer to weed the garden, she decides to plant a big row of really big weeds. "She said to weed the garden," insists Amelia Bedelia, "not unweed it."</p>
<p>When asked why anyone would want more weeds, Amelia Bedelia has to stop and think. "Maybe vegetables get hot just like people," she says. "They need big weeds to shade them."</p>
<p>Writing for a six-justice majority, Chief Justice John. G. Roberts Jr. recognized that the plaintiffs' attempt to explain why Congress would withhold subsidies for residents of some states was every bit as "implausible" — his word — as Amelia Bedelia's notion that vegetables need shade. In his view, other provisions of the statute demonstrated that Congress meant subsidies to be available nationwide.</p>
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<p>Nick has been one of the smartest, most consistent writers on the <i>King</i> case, and his Amelia Bedelia analogy perfectly captures the way the <i>King</i> plaintiffs read the Affordable Care Act.</p>
<p>Common sense suggested that of course Congress meant for all states to have insurance subsidies; health policy experts have always known that any law that requires people to buy coverage has to give those people financial help in order to make plans affordable.</p>
<p>The people who worked on the law — <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/26/us/politics/contested-words-in-affordable-care-act-may-have-been-left-by-mistake.html?_r=0">legislators</a>, <a href="http://www.vox.com/2015/3/2/8129539/king-burwell-history">staff members</a> — made the same suggestion, forcefully and repeatedly. They've said again and again that they never considered limiting subsidies to the state marketplaces. "I don’t ever recall any distinction between federal and state exchanges in terms of the availability of subsidies," Olympia J. Snowe, a former Republican senator from Maine who helped write the Finance Committee version of the bill, told the New York Times.</p>
<p>The only place where Bagley's analogy falls apart a bit is that unlike Amelia Bedelia — who in good faith seemed to think she really needed to plant more weeds in the garden — the <em>King </em>plaintiffs did something different. They tried to confused everyone else about the law in order to take it down. They were hit by sudden, strategic ignorance of how the whole thing worked — but they weren't able to infect the Court.</p>
https://www.vox.com/2015/6/26/8850889/obamacare-supreme-court-amelia-bedeliaSarah Kliff2015-06-26T08:54:00-04:002015-06-26T08:54:00-04:00Why Republicans will never come up with an Obamacare replacement
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<p>Philip Klein is one of the right's smartest health-care writers, and in the aftermath of <i>King v. Burwell</i>, he has <a target="_blank" href="http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/republicans-need-an-obamacare-alternative-now-more-than-ever/article/2567015">some advice</a> for Republicans: they need "to lay out a detailed vision for market-based system, and to spend the next election doggedly making their case."</p>
<p>This is not going to happen. Republicans are never going to unite around a serious replacement for Obamacare and endure the political pain necessary to get it passed.</p>
<p>How do I know? Well, I read <em><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Overcoming-Obamacare-Approaches-Reversing-Government/dp/0692361707/ref=tmm_pap_title_0?ie=UTF8&qid=1420697271&sr=8-1">Overcoming Obamacare</a>,</em><span> Klein's excellent book on Republicans and health-care reform. </span><span>And as Klein writes there, Republicans don't care that much about health reform. "Health-care policy has traditionally only been a motivating issue for conservative activists when it comes to opposing liberal attempts to expand the role of government."</span></p>
<p>This is the key difference between Democrats and Republicans on health reform. For Democrats, universal health care is a great moral crusade. It's one of the core purposes of the Democratic Party. <span>Democrats wanted to pass health reform more than they wanted to win the 2010 election. They were willing to have the internal party fight over what kind of plan to support, and then to go through the brutal legislative process required to make that plan into a bill, and then go through the political hell of canceling people's plans and implementing their replacement. </span></p>
<p>Republicans hate Obamacare. But every time they actually try to come up with a plan to replace it, they run into the same damn problem — and it reminds them why they never prioritized health reform in the first place.</p>
<h3>Why Republicans hate health reform</h3>
<p>One of the most perceptive points in Klein's book comes from Cato's Michael Cannon, one of the architects of the <i>King v. Burwell</i> case.</p>
<p>"Conservatives are falling into the same trap now that they fell into with fighting the Clinton health plan ... they’re conceding the left’s premises that the government should be trying to provide everybody with health insurance, or the government should be trying to expand access to health insurance, or the government should be subsidizing health insurance, because some people need help and therefore the federal government should be the one to help them. The problem [comes] because once you accept those premises, all of your solutions look like the left’s solutions. They look like Obamacare. And so a lot of conservatives, as much as they want to repeal it and say they want to repeal Obamacare, they’re still pushing replace<b> </b>plans that amount to ‘Obamacare Lite.’"</p>
<p>Cannon is right. The basic project of health reform, at least as it's been understood in American politics in recent decades, involves the government giving money to poor people so they can buy health-care insurance. That money needs to come from somewhere. The government usually gets it from politically unsympathetic constituencies like the rich and corporations, both of which lean Republican. In the case of <a href="http://www.vox.com/cards/obamacare/what-is-obamacare" target="_blank">Obamacare</a>, Medicare cuts were added to the package, meaning another Republican-tilting constituency — the elderly — absorbed the pain.</p>
<p>The problem for conservatives is that making sure poor people have health insurance is politically popular, at least in the abstract. But the plans that achieve it tend to be in tension with both broad tenets of conservatism — they raise taxes, it redistribute wealth, regulate insurers, and grow the government — and with key factions of the conservative coalition.</p>
<p>Health reform turns out to have a liberal bias.</p>
<h3>Republicans only care about health reform when Democrats make them</h3>
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<p class="caption">How Bill Clinton got Republicans to create Obamacare. (Sean Gallup/Getty Images)</p>
<p>The need to develop and support an alternative to whatever Democrats were proposing has led Republicans, including many conservatives, to back plans they later regret. In the 1990s, for instance, the <a href="http://kaiserhealthnews.org/022310-bill-comparison/">main Republican alternative</a> to President Bill Clinton's reforms paired regulations on insurers with subsidies for the poor and an individual mandate to force participation by the healthy. Sound familiar?</p>
<p>The bill ultimately failed, but it inspired the Massachusetts health reforms passed by then-Governor Mitt Romney, which in turn inspired Obamacare<strong>.</strong></p>
<p>For today's GOP, Klein says, "the elusive goal of repealing [Obamacare] has been the driving force behind Republican politics." It is ironic that the law Republicans loathe most is actually based on ideas they developed, and that their most recent presidential nominee actually implemented.</p>
<p>But it makes more sense if you take Klein's belief that conservatives don't care much about health reform and pair it with Cannon's insight that trying to provide everyone with health insurance is a fundamentally liberal project: the initial adoption of the alternative ideas was largely cynical — it was there to weaken support for Clinton's proposal, not become law — and the kinds of health-reform plans that resonate with the public and are viable alternatives to Democratic ideas will always, in the end, repel conservatives.</p>
<p>This is, fundamentally, the difference between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party on health-care reform. Democrats cared so much about health reform that they based their work on a plan Republicans came up with in order to give themselves a better chance of success. Republicans care so little about health reform that they haven't even bothered to choose one of their own plans to unite behind, much less made any painful ideological concessions to clear a path to passage.</p>
<h3>The loneliness of the conservative health wonk</h3>
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<p class="caption">Don't be sad, Paul Ryan. (Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)</p>
<p>Klein's book makes clear, perhaps accidentally, that the real fight in the Republican Party isn't between health wonks who favor different plans.<span> It's between those in the party who want to prioritize health reform and those who don't. And time and again, those who don't want to prioritize uniting around a health plan win the fight. It's five years after Obamacare, and we are still waiting for the Republican Party's leadership to propose detailed replacement plan.</span></p>
<p>It's not as if they haven't needed one, or promised one, or even set themselves deadlines for unveiling one. But as Peter Suderman, another smart health-care voice on the right, <a target="_blank" href="http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/06/gop-cant-win-health-care-king-burwell-obamacare-119290.html">says</a>, they haven't been able to deliver:</p>
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<p>In March, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.), the Republican Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, promised that he would have a bill ready and scored by the Congressional Budget Office by late June when the decision arrived. "We have to be prepared, by the time the ruling comes, to have something. Not months later," he said. Yet when Ryan finally unveiled the outlines of a plan last Wednesday, he provided few details, and no legislation or CBO score.</p>
<p>The story is similar in the Senate. In March, GOP senators John Barasso, Lamar Alexander and Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) announced in The Washington Post that they were ready with "a plan to create a bridge away from Obamacare." The workings of the plan had been widely discussed, the op-ed declared, and "there is a great deal of consensus on how to proceed."</p>
<p>But after a briefing for Republican Senators last week, two other Republican Senators—Lindsey Graham and John Cornyn—said flatly that there was no consensus about what to do.</p>
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<p>Suderman concludes: "The GOP plan is always in development but never ready for final release."</p>
<p>That's not an accident. Health reform isn't rocket science. The various options are reasonably well-known. The various paths are pretty clear. There are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of fully formed plans laying around in think tanks and congressional offices. But whenever Republicans decide to settle on one, they ultimately flinch, and for good reason.</p>
<h3>The terrible politics of health reform</h3>
<p><span>Health reform is an incredibly tough, painful project. Everything you do has tradeoffs, some of them awful. </span></p>
<p><span></span><span>In the book, many of Klein's interlocutors focus on Obamacare's regulation that exchange insurance can only charge older applicants three times as much as younger applicants. This raises prices for the young. </span></p>
<p><span>"If you really want to make a dent in the uninsured population," says Avik Roy, a health scholar at the Manhattan Institute, "the goal shouldn’t be to make insurance more expensive for young people. It should be to make insurance less expensive for young people."</span></p>
<p>His plan would allow insurers to charge older applicants six times more than younger applicants. And he's right: that would make health care cheaper for younger applicants, and it would mean more of them get insured. But it would also make health insurance more expensive for older applicants, who often need the insurance more desperately. This is a hard, ugly choice, not an easy one — and it's likely to be an unpopular choice with the older voters who are most loyal to the Republican Party.</p>
<p>Some of the provisions in the conservative replacement plans will be wildly unpopular. Many of them try to sharply curtail the tax preference employers get to offer insurance. Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal, for instance, converts it into a standard deduction for anyone — employed or not. The problem is the deduction is worth much less than many of the plans employers currently offer. It would, overnight, make some of the most generous plans offered by employers completely unaffordable. This sounds like a good idea to many health wonks, including me. We shouldn't be offering unique subsidies to employer-provided insurance, and we definitely shouldn't be making those subsidies unlimited in their scope. But it's political death.</p>
<p>It is, in fact, an echo of a plan Sen. John McCain proposed in the 2008 election. That plan was such a gaping vulnerability that, as Klein notes, the Obama campaign's attack ad against it stands as the single most <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-fix/wp/2014/04/08/watch-obama-hit-mccain-in-the-single-most-aired-campaign-ad-of-the-past-decade/">widely aired</a> attack ad of the last decade. (The Obama administration later took a modest, and hypocritical, step toward curtailing the deductibility of pricey employer plans with Obamacare's <a href="http://voices.washingtonpost.com/ezra-klein/2009/10/explaining_the_excise_tax.html">excise tax</a>.)</p>
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<p>That ad is a reminder that while Republicans have spent the last four years attacking Obamacare for its tough tradeoffs and unpopular decisions, the moment they begin pushing a serious alternative, they'll suddenly have to deal with Democrats doing the same to them. And Democrats will be doing it from the higher ground of the post-Obamacare world: there will be millions and millions of people getting health insurance from the very program Republicans want to destroy, and every single one of them will be a possible story to use in an attack ad.</p>
<p>If a Republican wins the White House in 2016, they'll have to decide whether to spend their precious political capital repealing and replacing Obamacare. Imagine Jeb Bush is being inaugurated in January 2017. Is he really going to want to spend his first year on health reform rather than education? Does he want to begin his presidency by upending health insurance for 20 million people? Does he really want the endless negotiations with the insurance companies and pharmaceutical companies and hospital lobbies and Medicaid advocates?</p>
<p>In his Thursday column, Klein warns that "if Republicans go back to hibernation mode on healthcare after this decision, it will guarantee that the next round of reform will once again wait until Democrats can reclaim power." But that is, on some level, what Republicans want. They are happy to let health reform be the Democrats' problem, even if they are not happy with the kinds of solutions Democrats pass.</p>
https://www.vox.com/2015/1/16/7552657/republican-obamacare-replace-planEzra Klein2015-06-25T15:20:01-04:002015-06-25T15:20:01-04:00Some Republicans are secretly relieved by the Obamacare ruling
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<p>Amid a flurry of official statements declaring shock, outrage, and disappointment after <a href="http://www.vox.com/2015/6/15/8779143/obamacare-repeal-dead-supreme-court">the Supreme Court upheld</a> the Affordable Care Act's federal insurance subsidies Thursday, Republicans quietly confided they were feeling something else, too: relief.</p>
<p>The fight over whether and how to repair the law could have been a disaster for the GOP. A <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/news/poll-obamacare-and-the-supreme-court/">CBS News/New York Times poll</a> released this week found that 70 percent of respondents wanted the court to keep the subsidies and 64 percent wanted Congress to replace them if the court had struck them down. But Republicans, who control both chambers of Congress, had not coalesced around a viable plan to help the millions of Americans who risked losing their insurance if the court swung against the law.</p>
<p><q aria-hidden="true" class="left">"Ironically, the decision liberates Republican presidential candidates to speak with clarity about what they would do if elected"</q></p>
<p>So even though Chief Justice John Roberts wrote another opinion upholding the health-care law, the conservative actually did Republicans a favor. The 6-3 ruling spares House and Senate GOP leaders from having to act. And it liberates Republican primary contenders from having to talk about subsidies. Instead, Republicans can return to the safe ground of "repeal and replace" Obamacare rhetoric rather than having to go down the far riskier road to action.</p>
<p>"They're actually politically helped, perhaps, by the decision," said one veteran House Republican who asked not to be named while discussing the political benefit of a policy loss. Had the court ruled the other way, he said, "it would have put Republicans squarely on the hot seat."</p>
<p>In conversations on the Hill, several Republican lawmakers and aides agreed that while losing the ruling is a major blow, it takes pressure off the party's candidates.</p>
<p>"It probably does," said Rep. Adam Kinzinger, an Illinois Republican, who quickly added that "there's not a single Republican that is happy it went this way."</p>
<h3>Safe ground</h3>
<p>Republican presidential candidates retreated to the safe ground of condemning the ruling and the overall law in broad strokes after the decision was handed down Thursday morning.</p>
<p>"I will work with Congress to repeal and replace this flawed law with conservative reforms that empower consumers with more choices and control over their health care decisions," former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who is leading the GOP presidential field in recent polling, said in a statement.</p>
<p>Rand Paul, the Kentucky senator who is seeking the presidency, said, "I would make it my mission to repeal it, and propose real solutions for our health-care system."</p>
<p>Republican pollster Kellyanne Conway said that the ruling gives Republicans an opportunity to work with a "clean slate" in developing alternative plans for the health care system.</p>
<p>"Ironically, the decision liberates Republican presidential candidates to speak with clarity about what they would do if elected," she said. "THey are unencumbered from commenting on any of the alternative Republican congressional plans prepared in anticipation of a different ruling today. They have a renewed platform to highlight the burdens and unfairness on American families and businesses."</p>
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<h3>Republican leaders aren't eager for this fight</h3>
<p>The best evidence that Republican leaders aren't eager to make Obamacare the central issue of the 2016 campaign may have come from House Speaker John Boehner. He and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell had assigned a task force of Republican committee chairs to propose a fix in case the court struck down the insurance subsidies.</p>
<p>The outlines of that plan were presented to rank-and-file Republicans last week, and Energy and Commerce Chair Fred Upton (R-MI) said Wednesday that they had been "ready to go" with the plan. But after the ruling, Boehner said there was no reason to push forward with the proposal to replace the existing system with a more conservative mix of block grants to states and subsidies that could be used to purchase a broad range of insurance policies.</p>
<p>"Now it's not necessary," he said, adding that "no decision has been made" on whether to pursue an Obamacare repeal through this year's budget. If Republicans think their replacement plan is better than the current system, why not pursue it?</p>
<p>The obvious answer: Boehner isn't rushing to elevate the fight over Obamacare as the 2016 election cycle heats up.</p>
<h3>But Democrats are</h3>
<p>Obama raced to the Rose Garden Thursday to endorse the court's decision — and chide Republicans for trying to overturn the law nicknamed for him.</p>
<p>"Today, after more than 50 votes in Congress to repeal or weaken this law; after a presidential election based in part on preserving or repealing this law; after multiple challenges to this law before the Supreme Court," Obama said, "the Affordable Care Act is here to stay."</p>
<p>And it wasn't just a president who is done seeking reelection who was quick to seek political advantage in the court's ruling.</p>
<p>Hillary Clinton, the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, sent out an email Thursday encouraging supporters to "stand with me on health care."</p>
<p>As first lady, Clinton fell short in her effort to rewrite the nation's health insurance system. But she was a behind-the-scenes bit player in the passage of the Affordable Care Act, providing private counsel to White House aides and encouraging some allies in Congress to vote for it.</p>
<p>"The next president will either protect and expand health care for every American, or undo the progress we’ve made," she wrote.</p>
<p>Conway said it's not a clear victory for Clinton.<br><br>"It's a political win for President Obama, but a sticky wicket for Hillary Clinton," Conway said. "She will be forced to support an unpopular law as the focus shifts from its constitutionality to its workability, and may be forced to address Bernie Sanders' call to go even further with a single-payer program."</p>
<h3>"Relief on the tactical level"</h3>
<p>No one should be confused about the fact that Republicans are upset by the ruling. They fought tooth and nail to stop the law from being enacted, shut down the government in 2013 over their failure to repeal it, and have done everything in their power to show that it's been a terrible law.</p>
<p>But a lot of them weren't looking forward to spending the rest of this Congress talking about how to put Obama's law back together. It would have been a messy process, with no guarantee that they could get a plan through either or both chambers. And, of course, there's little chance that they could have found common ground with Obama to sign their fix.</p>
<p>That is, they were facing a whole lot of work with little likelihood of having anything to show for it at the end of the process — other than yet another highly charged political battle over the same law.</p>
<p>"To a person, we think it's terrible for the country, and we want to see it gone," said one senior GOP aide who nonetheless acknowledged feeling "some relief on the tactical level."</p>
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https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2015/6/25/8846659/republicans-relieved-obamacareJonathan Allen2015-06-25T12:50:01-04:002015-06-25T12:50:01-04:00This was not a liberal ruling by John Roberts
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<p>There's a lot of talk on political Twitter about whether Chief Justice John Roberts is proving himself a closet liberal. But the <a href="http://www.vox.com/obamacare" target="_blank">Obamacare decision today</a> is a very conservative decision, legally speaking.</p>
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<p dir="ltr" lang="en">BREAKING: CHIEF JUSTICE JOHN HUSSEIN ROBERTS IS A TRANS-CONSITUTIONALIST - (a liberal trapped in the body of faux-conservative).</p>
— Jay Severin III (@Jay_Severin) <a href="https://twitter.com/Jay_Severin/status/614088346399342593">June 25, 2015</a>
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<p dir="ltr" lang="en">The <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/LiberalActivism?src=hash">#LiberalActivism</a> of Chief Justice Roberts Strikes Again <a href="http://t.co/dbnaUboFyn">http://t.co/dbnaUboFyn</a> via <a href="https://twitter.com/TreyMays">@TreyMays</a></p>
— The Truth Dispatch (@TruthDispatch) <a href="https://twitter.com/TruthDispatch/status/614091670355705861">June 25, 2015</a>
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<p>On the Affordable Care Act, Roberts simply declined to reinterpret a sweeping piece of legislation from the bench. This is the kind of judicial restraint — if a decision this obvious even deserves the moniker "restraint" — that conservatives used to call for in judges.</p>
<p>Rewind the tape a couple of years, and conservatives were furious at judges who tried to "legislate from the bench." Condemning "judicial activism" was an applause line at Republican rallies. "I made a promise to the American people during the campaign that ... we would seek judges who would faithfully interpret the Constitution and not use the courts to invent laws or dictate social policy," George W. Bush <a href="http://theusconstitution.org/text-history/432" target="_blank">said</a> in 2008.</p>
<p>John Roberts was one of those judges. He got confirmed by a Republican Senate by saying, "It's my job to call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat." <span>Today, he called a pitch that went way over the batter's head a ball. He was asked to reinvent a law and remake social policy, and he ... didn't. </span></p>
<p><span>It's true that political conservatives dislike Obamacare, and many of them wanted to see the law wounded by the Supreme Court. But the means by which they wanted to achieve that victory weren't conservative at all.</span></p>
<p>In the aggregate, there's a case to be made that the Roberts Court, in general, is coming to liberal decisions more often than was expected. See the New York Times for <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/06/23/upshot/the-roberts-courts-surprising-move-leftward.html" target="_blank">the full details</a>. But in this case, even if liberals are happy with the Obamacare decision and conservatives are upset about it, deferring to Congress's clear intent is supposed to be the way conservative judges rule.</p>
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https://www.vox.com/2015/6/25/8846025/liberal-john-roberts-obamacareEzra Klein2015-06-25T11:55:00-04:002015-06-25T11:55:00-04:00Justice Scalia's sick burn: Don't call it Obamacare, call it SCOTUScare
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<p>The Supreme Court just upheld a key part of the Affordable Care Act in the case <a href="http://www.vox.com/cards/obamacare-subsidies-lawsuit" target="_blank"><i>King v. Burwell</i></a>, allowing 6.4 million people to keep tax subsidies they were getting to buy health insurance on the federal exchange on Healthcare.gov. Justice Antonin Scalia is pissed. The <a href="http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/14pdf/14-114_qol1.pdf" target="_blank">dissent he wrote in the case</a> includes the line:</p>
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<p>We should start calling this law SCOTUScare.</p>
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<p>In case you think we're making this up, here it is in the text of the dissent:</p>
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<p class="caption">(Supreme Court of the United States)</p>
<p>The dissent also includes the phrase "interpretive jiggery-pokery," and describes one of the arguments in Chief Justice Roberts's majority decision upholding the law as "pure applesauce."</p>
<div class="vox-cardstack"><a href="http://www.vox.com/cards/obamacare-subsidies-lawsuit">King v. Burwell: 10 facts to understand the big Obamacare lawsuit</a></div>
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<p>Read more about why Justice Scalia is so ruffled by checking out our main article on the <a href="http://www.vox.com/2015/6/25/8804053/king-v-burwell-obamacare-scotus-in-favor/in/5690430" target="_blank">6-3 decision to uphold the Obamacare subsidies</a>, or checking out all our <a href="http://www.vox.com/2014/7/22/5926389/halbig-the-court-case-that-could-undo-obamacare" target="_blank">King v. Burwell </a>coverage.</p>
https://www.vox.com/2015/6/25/8845449/scalia-dissent-obamacare-scotuscareDara Lind2015-06-25T11:36:53-04:002015-06-25T11:36:53-04:00This wasn’t a win for Obamacare. It was a win for 6 million people who rely on Obamacare.
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<figcaption>Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Anthony Kennedy may have been appointed by Republicans, but they delivered a brutal rebuttal to the case against Obamacare. | Pool/Getty Images</figcaption>
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<p><b>1)</b> This wasn't a "win for Obamacare." <a href="http://www.vox.com/obamacare" target="_blank">Obamacare</a> is words written on paper. This was a win for the more than 6 million people who will keep their health insurance. It's a win for parents who can be sure their children can go to the doctor, and for minimum-wage workers who can call an ambulance without worrying about debt. Basic health security for millions of people was on the line in this decision. Everything else was secondary to that.</p>
<p><b>2) </b>This was also a win for common sense, and for judicial restraint. On some level, what's most surprising about this case isn't that the Supreme Court upheld the subsidies, but that they ever took the case at all. This was a ridiculous case, based on a ridiculous argument, where the only hope of victory was that the Supreme Court had become an irreversibly partisan institution.</p>
<p><b>3)</b> In <a href="http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/14pdf/14-114_qol1.pdf" target="_blank">the majority opinion</a>, Chief Justice John Roberts put the fundamental absurdity of <a href="http://www.vox.com/cards/obamacare-subsidies-lawsuit" target="_blank"><i>King v. Burwell</i>'s argument</a> clearly: "Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them." Indeed.</p>
<p><b>4)</b> Something to note: The Supreme Court didn't take an easy out — they didn't use something like <a href="http://www.vox.com/2015/6/20/8815097/king-v-burwell-chevron-deference" target="_blank">Chevron deference</a> to split the difference or say it's simply not their role to second-guess the IRS. They didn't write an opinion that gave any shelter to the plaintiffs' argument. Instead, Roberts says that the Court's role in a case like this is to "determine the correct reading of the law." And that's what they did.</p>
<p><b>5)</b> The correct reading of the law, Roberts writes, is the government's reading. The plaintiffs in <i>King v. Burwell</i> claimed that the law came down to five words: "an Exchange established by the State." Read on their own, those words suggested that only state-based exchanges could use subsidies. But the government argued that those words weren't on their own. The law also said, in the absence of a state-based exchange, the law tells the government to establish "such Exchange."</p>
<p><b>6)</b> In the Court's opinion, the word "such" made all the difference. It makes clear that "the Act indicates that State and Federal Exchanges should be the same." If state exchanges got subsidies and federal exchanges didn't, then they wouldn't be the same.</p>
<p><b>7)</b> But the Court goes further than that. They do not rest their decision on semantics. They rest it on clear legislative intent.</p>
<p><b>8)</b> The decision begins with a lengthy description of Obamacare's "three-legged stool" — the way the law's subsidies, individual mandate, and regulations work together to create stable insurance markets. It then segues into the history of insurance death spirals in states that have tried to reform their health systems without building all three legs of the stool.</p>
<p><b>9) </b>Roberts gives a very crisp definition of how these death spirals worked: "As premiums rose higher and higher, and the number of people buying insurance sank lower and lower, insurers began to leave the market entirely. As a result, the number of people without insurance increased dramatically."</p>
<p><b>10)</b> In the Court's opinion, the plaintiffs' idea of how the law was meant to work is ridiculous. If they were right, then "the combination of no tax credits and an ineffective coverage requirement could well push a State's individual insurance market into a death spiral. It is implausible that Congress meant the Act to operate in this manner."</p>
<p><b>11)</b> In the end, the basic finding here isn't very complicated: Obamacare was designed to work the way everyone understood Obamacare was designed to work — which is also the way Obamacare has been working, and is <i>also</i> the only way Obamacare actually will work.</p>
<p><b>12)</b> The plaintiffs argued that Obamacare was designed to work in a way contrary to its fundamental goals — that it was, in essence, built to fail, at least in states that didn't establish their own exchanges. The plaintiffs argued this even though no member of Congress ever mentioned this insane plan, no state was ever told about it, and the Obama administration expressly denied it. The majority rightfully saw this as what it is: less a serious argument about the law than an effort to wound Obamacare by successfully pulling a Jedi mind trick on the Supreme Court.</p>
<p><b>13) </b>As the Court says, quoting <i>New York State Dept. of Social Servs. v. Dublino</i>, "We cannot interpret federal statutes to negate their own stated purposes."</p>
<p><b>14)</b> The majority's opinion ends on a philosophical note — not about health care, but about the role of the judiciary, and the role that the plaintiffs were trying to push the judiciary into playing. It's worth quoting at length:</p>
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<p>In a democracy, the power to make the law rests with those chosen by the people. Our role is more confined—"to say what the law is." That is easier in some cases than in others. But in every case we must respect the role of the Legislature, and take care not to undo what it has done. A fair reading of legislation demands a fair understanding of the legislative plan.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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<p>The plaintiffs, and many Republicans, were asking the Court to engage in judicial activism of breathtaking scale — using an unclearly worded sentence to upend the clear intent of one of the most significant laws passed in the last generation. In the end, the Court's four Democratic appointees, and two of its Republicans, refused. We should all be glad they did.</p>
https://www.vox.com/2015/6/25/8845501/king-burwell-obamacare-insuredEzra Klein2015-06-25T11:35:11-04:002015-06-25T11:35:11-04:00Watch live: President Obama speaks on Obamacare's victory at the Supreme Court
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<p><a style="font-family: Balto, Helvetica, Arial, 'Nimbus Sans L', sans-serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 1.65;" href="http://www.vox.com/cards/obamacare-subsidies-lawsuit" target="_blank">Obamacare</a> had a huge win at the Supreme Court today as the nation's highest court upheld the health-care law's subsidies. President Barack Obama is set to speak any moment now about the ruling. Watch above.</p>
https://www.vox.com/2015/6/25/8845809/supreme-court-obamacare-obamaGerman Lopez