21st Century Conservative Jurisprudence Defined

The comments to the latest Halbig post contain a truly remarkable comment by Patterico which is sort of the definitive analysis from the political and legal movement that brought us Bush v. Gore and Shelby County.  As I noted in the update, those rabid Obamabots Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy, Clarence Thomas, and Sam Alito interpreted the law correctly in terms of the availability of subsidies on the federal exchanges:

By contrast, because Congress thought that some States might decline federal funding for the operation of a “health benefit exchange,” Congress provided a backup scheme; if a State declines to participate in the operation of an exchange, the Federal Government will step in and operate an exchange in that State.

[…]

[d]ifficulty in attracting individuals outside of the exchange would in turn motivate insurers to enter exchanges, despite the exchanges’ onerous regulations.  That system of incentives collapses if the federal subsidies are invalidated. Without the federal subsidies, individuals would lose the main incentive to purchase insurance inside the exchanges, and some insurers may be unwilling to offer insurance inside of exchanges. With fewer buyers and even fewer sellers, the exchanges would not operate as Congress intended and may not operate at all.

They interpreted the law as making subsidies available on the federally established state exchanges just as they are on the state established state exchanges, not surprisingly because everybody did because that’s what the statute says.

So how does Patterico respond to the fact that four of the five votes he would need to willfully misread the law to wreck the exchanges clearly said that the federally established exchanges would provide the subsidies? The answer is highly revealing:

This is how the law was explained to them, and they obviously didn’t read it and focus on this issue. Now they will. And when they do, they will see what Congress did.

This is a remarkable admission on multiple levels. First of all, Patterico is saying that four Associate Justices of the Supreme Court of the United States and their chambers made arguments critical to both their argument that the Medicaid expansion was unconstitutional and that the rest of the ACA could not be severed if the mandate was found unconstitutional, but could not be bothered to “focus” on whether these arguments were actually true. He is arguing, in other words, that these four justices are unfit to serve on the Court. He is also now required to argue that the ACA clearly established something that not only four Supreme Court justices but the many highly experienced and compensated lawyers who “explained the law” to them — a number of them very hostile to the ACA — failed to see, an obviously ridiculous argument. And then he argues that these four justices, having made one argument in service of their political goal of destroying the ACA, will now make precisely the opposite argument in service of their political goal of destroying the ACA. The fact that he’s probably right is pretty much all I have to say about these four gentlemen.

And, of course, it’s even worse than this. What outcome is producing such smug self-satisfaction over such ludicrous hackery? Making sure a serial killer doesn’t go free? No — stripping millions of people of their health insurance, consigning some of them to needless suffering and death, and others to avoidable bankruptcy. If there’s a better way of describing the Republican Party in 2014, I don’t know what it is.