Weekend Reading: Scott Lemieux on the ACA Truthers...
"With this sentence, [Michael] Cannon is spitting out his own snake oil..."
: On Jonathan Adler and Michael Cannon: "The ACA was, in fact, passed with somewhat less haste than a turtle crawling through a tar pit...
...Nor did the Senate version pass by one vote--it passed with a 60-40 super-majority.... But even more telling is [Michael] Cannon's conclusion... [that] the Supreme Court acted:
to disenfranchise Republican and independent voters who swept ACA opponents into state office in 2009, 2010, and 2011 for the purpose of blocking the ACA....
With this sentence, Cannon is spitting out his own snake oil.... In a refreshing, if inadvertent, moment of honesty, Cannon is conceding the lawsuit wasn't designed to uphold the statute passed by Congress... [but] to 'enfranchise' the people who voted against the bill.... The fact that King was based on an almost comically transparent historical sham surely helps to explain why Roberts rejected the argument of the plaintiffs so forcefully... and foreclosed a different interpretation of the law by a future Republican administration... why Justice Anthony Kennedy joined the majority.... The contempt the court showed for the people who brought the suit certainly wasn't the product of any love for the ACA.
My guess is that Cannon and his collaborators had burrowed so deeply into their alternate universe that they fully expected evidence to emerge showing that Congress intended for its federal backstop to fail. (When it didn't emerge, they desperately tried to manufacture some, but their 'evidence' was so dishonest even most supporters of the lawsuit ignored it.)... As some opponents of the ACA have ruefully noted, one clear message of Roberts' opinion was essentially this: 'Stop bothering us with these frivolous ACA lawsuits.' Roberts and Kennedy may not like the ACA, but they also don't like being played for fools and made pawns in partisan litigation.
