The ACA Deus Ex Machina

Now this is how you bullshit people with a “poll,” ladies and gentlemen:

The most ideologically hard-core elements of the party have tried to make the case that Republicans should do nothing at all. One libertarian organization commissioned a poll designed to show that voters would not blame Republicans for doing nothing in the face of massive suffering. The poll has an unusually blunt method for producing this result. It asks, in the event the lawsuit is successful, whom voters would blame. The choices are:

“Congress, for poorly writing the law”
“The IRS, for giving out illegal subsidies in the first place”
“States, for refusing to establish Obamacare exchanges”
“Unsure”

Notice that, even aside from the loaded terms (“poorly writing,” “illegal”), none of those choices allows voters to blame the current, Republican-run Congress for failing to fix the law. The only “Congress” voters can blame is the old Democratic one that wrote the law in 2009–10. The poll does prove that the public will not blame Republicans in Congress if it is given a fixed menu of choices, of which blaming the Republican Congress is not one.

And, of course, there’s en more glaring omission: the Supreme Court. (Or, as the equivalent question would be worded, “a bare majority of the Supreme Court for willfully misreading the Affordable Care Act and taking subsidies away from more than 6 million people.”) The hack pollsters anticipated John Thune!

What Congress will do if the subsidies vanish because of some eternally unknowable cause is nothing. Which, alas, is better than any possible Republican alternative.