StrangeSox

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Jun 25, 2015 -> 12:44 PM) I think if it were "clear" there wouldn't be lawsuits over it. It's anything but. Are you aware of where this challenge originated? It was part of a political conference that set out to destroy Obamacare using any means possible. This wasn't some principled legal stand. Hell, that they had to work so hard to find any eligible plaintiffs and even then, there were very legitimate questions about standing for all four of them says a lot. But nobody came up with this "federal exchanges don't count" interpretation until well after the bill had been signed into law, and it was developed by political opponents explicitly looking for anything they could to destroy the law.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Jun 25, 2015 -> 12:44 PM) I think if it were "clear" there wouldn't be lawsuits over it. It's anything but. Hack lawsuits that were rejected by every court that heard them (DC circuit was pretty much a lock to reverse en banc) don't say anything about the merits.

QUOTE (Balta1701 @ Jun 25, 2015 -> 12:41 PM) Of course the problem is that the rest of the bill clearly says and implies the opposite so "Read the d*** words in the text" applies throughout. Exactly. Here's but one of many examples you can find: Under Scalia's interpretation, we'd have the federal government creating a bunch of exchanges for which there are no subsidies and nobody is actually even eligible to use. Clearly, relying on his "common sense" distinction of when they use 'exchange' or 'exchange established by the state' leads to all sorts of wacky, nonsensical problems that Roberts' reading doesn't. I'd go with the reading that aligns with the explicitly stated intent of the law and everyone who read and discussed it when it was being drafted and passed over the reading that fundamentally breaks the bill and destroys private insurance markets in 34 states.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Jun 25, 2015 -> 12:36 PM) Not really. The basis of his decision is "Congress used these words on purpose. There is no ambiguity, no matter how much you want to claim there is." He's not saying rely on common sense, he says read the damn words in the text. And his position is true: the court shouldn't be plugging the holes of a bill. That's not their job. SCOTUS has done that 3 times now. Then he's just factually wrong. The drafting history of how those words got into the final bill is well-documented. They came in from different versions of the bill being merged together, and the bill where the language originated was significantly different in this particular aspect. The final bill sloppily retained that language, but there was no intent to withhold the subsidies. The record of the CBO scoring, the debates, the way the various state governments interpreted it all lend weight to this. Scalia's own opinion in NFIB lends weight to it! The fact that nobody thought it "clearly" limited the subsidies until political activists went looking for whatever they could find to undermine the law and described this as a novel "glitch" lends even more weight to it.

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Jun 25, 2015 -> 12:32 PM) Hack work my ass. Dumb baby grandstanding may be more accurate, but still not great work. edit: no, hack work is accurate: I dunno, anyone reading a statute that mandates states to establish exchanges or instructs to federal government to construct "such exchange" if they fail to?

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Jun 25, 2015 -> 12:26 PM) You can still appreciate it for what it is, even if you don't agree with the result. I love the last two paragraphs: Pretty much. I love how he also called an argument "applesauce." So great. On a first read, it's overwrought hack-work. I appreciate the sweet, sweet tears and his hypocrisy. He assumes his own conclusion over and over, relies on appeals to "common sense" instead of how the bill was actually drafted and passed through congress (why it says "...by the state" in some areas and not in others), and his closing statement could very easily be turned against him by changing "favors" to "disfavors" and "uphold and assist" to "undermine and destroy." for example: Words no longer have meaning!!! And no clearer way? Well, you could not bury that phrase in a formula for calculating federal tax credits and not make it clear anywhere else within the bill. You could not have the federal government establish "such exchange" if the states don't do it themselves. You could explicitly say "FEDERAL EXCHANGES ARE NOT ELIGIBLE FOR SUBSIDIES" or "ONLY STATE EXCHANGES ARE ELIGIBLE FOR SUBSIDIES." There are trivially easy ways to limit tax credits to state Exchanges. He doesn't ever really get around the addressing the arguments laid out in multiple briefs filed with the court that Roberts seems to rely heavily on (or at least they're very similar to his opinion).

QUOTE (Jenksismyb**** @ Jun 25, 2015 -> 12:03 PM) Scalia's dissent is a great read. I agree but I'm sure for completely different reasons.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Jun 25, 2015 -> 11:57 AM) You trust the teams player development for lower minors hitters? If this team is never going to be able to develop position players, they're doomed anyway.

this is just a bunch of concern trolling

QUOTE (illinilaw08 @ Jun 25, 2015 -> 11:38 AM) That's easier said than done when the Voting Rights Act was gutted by SCOTUS. QUOTE (StrangeSox @ Jun 24, 2015 -> 08:35 AM) Well, Democrats are taking the opportunity to push something more substantive than taking down the flags. Senator Patrick Leahy and Congressman John Lewis are introducing legislation to rebuild the Voting Rights Act that was gutted by a Supreme Court ruling two years ago.

QUOTE (Soxfest @ Jun 25, 2015 -> 10:43 AM) I do not know anyone who's deductible that is not thousands of dollars more. :raises hand: :points to numerous studies and surveys directly contradicting that claim: :also points to millions of people who can afford any insurance at all thanks to the subsidies:

Really makes you wonder why the case was granted cert in the first place since 1) they upheld the lower court ruling and 2) there wasn't even a split among the lower courts (once the DC Circuit announced they were going to rehear the case before them). Did Kennedy vote with Scalia, Alito and Thomas to grant cert hoping to grab Roberts but was ultimately convinced the case was really a sham? opinion available here (source is SCOTUSblog) The court didn't even rely on ambiguity and "Chevron" agency interpretation, they flat-out ruled that the availability of subsidies is unambiguous and that the argument to the contrary requires ignoring the entire rest of the statute. this part of the decision neatly explains why this legal argument couldn't find traction in any of the lower courts in the first place: a key feature of Roberts not even really getting to Chevron ambiguity: it's not even about agency interpretation, so a hypothetical future Republican administration couldn't direct the IRS to 're-interpret' the statute so as to remove subsidies from Federal exchanges. Short of changing the law in Congress, subsidies are here to stay.

Decision of the Fourth Circuit is affirmed in King v. Burwell. 6-3. Roberts with the opinion. Holding is that subsidies are available on all exchanges. Six are the Chief, Kennedy, Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan.

lol

So now that whining about taking down the flag of white supremacists is done, what's next? Whining about no longer honoring white supremacist terrorists by naming schools and streets after them?

yup

Well, Democrats are taking the opportunity to push something more substantive than taking down the flags. Senator Patrick Leahy and Congressman John Lewis are introducing legislation to rebuild the Voting Rights Act that was gutted by a Supreme Court ruling two years ago.

two weeks from today I'll be hiking here:

That seems like the appropriate conclusion to draw!

Cool

Yeah, asking for a policy plan to solve racism would be ridiculous. And it's great that you are trying to raise your children right, but this isn't an individual issue, it's a societal problem. It won't be solved if people don't look at wider cultural influences and where this sort of ideology comes from in the first place. How can you rely on better parents to root out racism in areas where it's entrenched and many of the parents are themselves racist? Look at homophobia. Has that been greatly improved by ignoring it on aa societal level and hoping for the best? Or has it gotten better pretty quickly because publicly acceptable and government endorsed homophobia has been challenged? It's changed much more quickly than "parents raise better kids" can account for, including many parents themselves changing their minds.

That isn't really saying much of anything or providing any sort of solution or change though.

QUOTE (Y2HH @ Jun 23, 2015 -> 05:17 PM) See, that's where we differ. You are interested in these little things that accomplish nothing, whereas I would much prefer to face the actual issue. If you fix the root of the issue the rest of the tree heals and these "false gods" and "symbols" will all disappear on their own. In the end we want the same result. But if you guys didn't keep whining about people calling for the flag to come down it would have amounted to a handful of posts and you guys could be talking about these unspecified real issues you keep mentioning.

QUOTE (Y2HH @ Jun 23, 2015 -> 05:12 PM) We didn't say it would prevent anything, we are simply saying it also didn't solve anything, and it didn't. It solves the problem of government endorsement of white supremacist symbols. But so far all of the useless distraction seems to be coming from the people insisting on telling everyone why the symbol isn't racist or why taking it down won't solve racism. So why not just stop, let the flag be taken down, and then advocate for the causes you think will help.

QUOTE (southsider2k5 @ Jun 23, 2015 -> 04:55 PM) And yet still SS backed parties and groups still exist in Germany. Some even get elected to office. You are just reinforcing the point that taking down a flag, or even banning a flag, isn't fixing the actual problem. There is no single solution, but removing state endorsement of white supremacist symbols is a step in the right direction. I'll ask you again, what do you think removal of a symbol of white supremacy from state endorsement is preventing that would fix the "actual problem" of the prevalence and pervasiveness of racist ideology?