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BRIAN BEUTLER’S CRITICISM OF HALBIG JUDGES MISSED THIS ONE VERY IMPORTANT DETAIL


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brian-beutlers-criticism-of-halbig-judges-missed-this-one-very-important-detailPatterico :
7/24/2014

Filed under: General — Patterico @ 8:01 am

Brian Beutler of the New Republic had a post yesterday titled The Conservative Judges Who Ruled Against Obamacare Missed This One Very Important Detail. The post selectively quotes the judges in the Halbig majority, omitting the part that destroys the premise of his entire post.

 

I’ll quote Beutler at length so you can see what his omission was, and how it kills his argument:

 

We now know that two conservative judges on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals have declared it illegal for the government to subsidize Obamacare health plans in states that didn’t set up their own insurance exchanges. In reaching that conclusion, Judge Thomas Griffith, who authored the opinion of the court, sought to rebut each of the Obama administration’s arguments to the contrary—that the law clearly contemplates subsidizing health plans in every state whether or not a state built its own marketplace.

 

But in one instance he based his counterargument on information that became outdated less than one week ago. And the recent development turns that counterargument on its head. Scissors-32x32.png


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POSTED ON JULY 24, 2014 BY PAUL MIRENGOFF IN IRS, LAW, OBAMACARE

DRAFTING ERROR VS. DRAFTING MISCALCULATION

Sean Davis, a former congressional staffer, examines the claim that the provision in Obamacare limiting subsidies to those participating in state exchanges was the product of “drafting error.” He finds it laughable.

 

I discussed what a legislative drafting error looks like here. Davis sees it the same way: Scissors-32x32.png

 

 

The validity of the IRS’s rule must stand or fall on this assertion. And given the clarity of the statutory language, no court acting in good faith could sustain the IRS’s rule.

 

Absent a drafting error in the true sense, black can only black; it cannot mean white. Scissors-32x32.png

 

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/07/drafting-error-vs-drafting-miscalculation.php

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Cyber_Liberty

This was certainly not a "drafting error." Congress was quite deliberate about the subsidy clause excluding states that did not set up an exchange. They knew that if they tried to make the exchanges mandatory they would be nixed by the courts (even the Roberts court would not tolerate "ordering" states to expand Medicaid, for example). So, what could they do? They sweetened the pot to lure the states into building their own exchanges by offering the subsidy to them, but not to states that don't build an exchange. The lack of subsidy for the Federal exchange was not a bug, it was a feature.

 

The plan backfired when over 30 states refused. To get around it, Obama's people did what they do best...they got out a pen and a phone and simply make up the law ad hoc.

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POSTED ON JULY 25, 2014 BY SCOTT JOHNSON IN IRS, OBAMACARE
EXPLICATING EXCHANGES

Following up on Paul Mirengoff’s series of posts on the DC Circuit’s Halbig decision, I want to draw attention to Kim Strassel’s weekly Wall Street Journal column exploring “The Obamacare-IRS nexus” (behind the Journal’s subscription paywall but accessible via Google). Strassel exposes the role played by the IRS at the behest of the White House in promulgating regulations ignoring the limitation of Obamacare subsidies to exchanges established by states. Democrats had assumed that the limitation would be sufficient to coerce states into establishing Obamacare exchanges, but that the calculation behind the assumption failed. What happened next? Strassel writes: Scissors-32x32.png

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/07/explicating-exchanges.php

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The Agony of Jonathan Gruber: Michael F. Cannon’s Revenge

The Obamacare architect just got pwned by his past self.

 

JULY 25, 2014 By Ben Domenech

 

This week there’s been a ton of talk about the Halbig case, and the left has been consistently advancing the notion that this is all a Republican lie based on a typo or a drafting error. Sean Davis debunked that notion here. But one of the foremost advocates of this view is Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber. He was on MSNBC just the other day talking about it:

 

“Chris, it is unambiguous this is a typo. Literally every single person involved in the crafting of this law has said that it`s a typo, Scissors-32x32.png

Scissors-32x32.png

http://thefederalist.com/2014/07/25/the-agony-of-jonathan-gruber-michael-f-cannons-revenge/

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