And now the voice of reason comes in to clear things up for everyone and assure the Tea Partiers indeed this part of the law too shall be upheld:
…under the Supreme Court’s Chevron Doctrine, courts typically defer to a federal agency’s reading of a law so long as “the agency’s answer is based on a permissible construction of the statute.” Randolph and Griffith get around this doctrine by claiming that the law “the ACA unambiguously restricts the section 36B subsidy to insurance” purchased on state-run exchanges.
If you truly believe that the only possible interpretation of the Affordable Care Act’s language is the one adopted by Randolph and Griffith on Tuesday, then you may want to go back to the top of this article and start reading it all over again. In any event, two federal judges previously concluded that Obamacare is unambiguous in the other direction — that is, it unambiguously offers subsidies to people who purchase insurance through federal exchanges. That alone demonstrates that, even if the law isn’t completely clear, its meaning is at least uncertain enough that the courts should defer to the agency’s reading underChevron.
More importantly, Randolph and Griffith’s own colleagues are unlikely to allow this opinion to stand for long. The federal government may now appeal this decision to the full United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, where Democrats enjoy a 7-4 majority among the court’s active judges. It is unlikely, to say the least, that a Democratic bench will strike down President Obama’s primary legislative accomplishment based on the highly doubtful reasoning contained in Randolph and Griffith’s opinion.
Should the full DC Circuit intervene, of course, their decision can ultimately be appealed to the GOP-controlled Supreme Court. But we’ve already seen this story play out once before. The last time conservative lawyers brought a case to the Supreme Court seeking to gut Obamacare, Chief Justice John Roberts voted to uphold the bulk of the law.