Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia’s dissent in today’s Obamacare ruling should be cause for concern of the integrity of the Court.
The Supreme Court handed down its decision in King v. Burwell this morning, the case that could have ended Obamacare subsidies for 6.4 million Americans, if Justice Antonin Scalia had his way. Fortunately, he did not.
The majority opinion was written by Chief Justice John Roberts, and, in essence, upheld the intent of Congress which enacted the Affordable Care Act. At issue were just a few words in the huge health care law that, as many have said, were in essence a typo.
That “typo” changed the meaning of the section that outlines rules on federal subsidies, effectively claiming that Americans who bought their healthcare through the federal marketplace exchanges and not state marketplace exchanges, were not entitled to a federal subsidy to help them afford healthcare, which now is required by law.
The Affordable Healthcare Act’s name alone should have made the lawsuit moot, but Republicans insist the law is “tyranny!” and have spent untold millions to derail it.
In his dissent in today’s ruling, Justice Scalia called the majority opinion that once again validated the intent and legality of Obamacare, “pure applesauce.”
He also used a term that you likely have never heard before: “jiggery-pokery.”
Allow me to introduce you to the term:
Yes, that is a 19th century term the Supreme Court justice used.
It’s now the 21st century.
Were there no terms, no words that he could have used that fit today’s world?
Scalia, who in fact is a young earth creationist, as he revealed just weeks ago while speaking at his granddaughter’s graduation, is living in a society that hasn’t existed in centuries.
He claimed in April that same-sex marriage is “unpalatable” to people of faith, and therefore should not be made legal nationwide, ignoring the millions of Catholics, Christians, Protestants, Jews, Muslims, and other people of faith who support the right of same-sex couples to marry.
Justice Scalia, who believes the devil is a real person, also wrongly tried to argue back in April that if same-sex marriage is legal, pastors and preachers will be forced to marry same-sex couples, which, we must assume, he knows if “pure applesauce.”
Upon his retirement, hopefully whoever sits in the Oval office will nominate someone who understands both history and the modern day world.
Justice Scalia boasts he is a textualist, a person who believes that the Constitution is not subject to interpretation, that only the words in it exactly as they are written, cannot be applied, defined, or expanded to mean anything else.
The Constitution has survived in its present form exactly because it is so flexible – the genius of its design.
Justice Scalia, in order to validate his ultra-conservative, anti-LGBT, anti-women world-view, thinks otherwise.
We think that’s just “jiggery-pokery.”
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