It is kind of crazy that two separate courts made two opposite rulings on ObamaCare. Both courts were looking at the same thing – are subsidies for ObamaCare legal?
From Abbe Gluck –
As Marty notes, the opinion is out. Initial quick reaction, more to come: The opinion is terribly disappointing from a statutory interpretation perspective. It relies in part on irrelevant legislative history (from the HELP committee, whose bill wasn’t even the basis for these provisions–the Finance committee’s was) and gets it wrong anyway (as I argued here); it bends over backwards to come up with reasons why Congress might have intended this result (which we all know it certainly did not); and it attaches far too much significance to a line in the statute that expressly deems exchanges in the territories to be state exchanges and does not replicate the special deeming language for the federal exchanges. The territories language is boilerplate language used by Congress when talking about territories in statutes even beyond the ACA, and should have been attached no significance here. What’s more, applying the exclusio unius presumption (that when Congress specifies X we can assume that it meant not to specify X elsewhere) to a statute as long and complicated as the ACA — and one that did not go through the usual linguistic “clean up” process in Conference (as I wrote here) does a disservice to textualism and all those who have defended it over the years–turning it into a wooden unreasonable formalism rather than the sophisticated statutory analysis that textualists have been claiming they are all about.
Who is Abbe Gluck?
Oh, here is part 2 –
Making sure our readers keep up with this roller-coaster day in health reform land: The Fourth Circuit released its own opinion (3-0, with a strong concurrence from J. Davis) rejecting the subsidies challenge pending in that court right after the DC Circuit released its own opinion sustaining the same challenge there . The Fourth Circuit went with a straight Chevron argument, but indicated it thought the government had the better reading of the statutory text in any event. Judge Davis concurred specially to make the point that Chevron wasn’t even necessary: that the statute clearly requires the subsidies on the federal exchanges. Of interest to statutory interpretation types (and along the lines of what I’ve been arguing in previous posts), Judge Davis also argued that this isn’t a case of “textualism v. purposivism” or statutory text versus some amorphous concept of congressional intent. Davis argued that the text of the statute as a whole answers the question definitely in favor of the Government.
