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" Your Special Bonus Afternoon Dooley: &amp;quot;No matther whether th&amp;#039; constitution follows th&amp;#039; flag or not, th&amp;#039; Supreme Coort follows th&amp;#039; illiction returns.&amp;quot; -- Finley Peter Dunne, 1901 And so they have. On Tuesday, there was something of an ideological shift in our politics. You may have noticed. Then, yesterday, a federal circuit court of appeals pretty much shoved the question of marriage equality in the direction of the Supreme Court. And then, today, the Supreme Court accepted review of King v. Burwell, the completely preposterous ruling in which the D.C. Court of Appeals said that the people who drafted the law didn&amp;#039;t mean what they clearly meant. The challengers say the provision means that only people in states with their own exchanges can get subsidies. Congress made the distinction, they say, to encourage states to participate. But the Internal Revenue Service has issued a regulation saying subsidies are allowed whether the exchange is run by a state or by the federal government. The challengers say that regulation is at odds with the law. In response, Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. told the justices that the I.R.S. interpretation was correct. The one offered by the challengers, he said, is &amp;quot;contrary to the act&amp;#039;s text and structure and would render the act unrecognizable to the Congress that passed it.&amp;quot; Jonathan Chait is the one who established the meme. He resorted to illustrating it with the famous Seinfeld episode in which George Costanza insists that the Moops invaded Spain in the 8th Century because that&amp;#039;s what it says on the card. The argument that the Moops invaded your doctor&amp;#039;s office is now as deadly serious in reality as it is ridiculous on its face. The Nine Wise Souls wouldn&amp;#039;t have been able to take this case if there already weren&amp;#039;t four votes to do so, which means that at least four of them think El Cid got strapped to his horse to fight against the invading Moops. That likely leaves the deciding vote to Chief Justice John Roberts, who upheld the law the last time it came before him, but did so in a way that allowed various inhumane Republican governors to reject the FREE MONEY (!) available under the expansion of the Medicaid program. Several governors then saved our freedom by arranging the illness of various poor people in their states. Roberts let that happen. Now, the fate of the law itself sits in his lap. I am not optimistic. There is no question of there having been a long game played against this law within the political culture. Most of the attention was paid to the numerous futile attempts by the House of Representatives to repeal the law entirely. But the real campaign was to set up a context within which the law could be so cored out of its essential elements that it would fall of its own weight. In his insufferable cock-a-doodle-doo of triumph in today&amp;#039;s Washington Post, Charles Krauthammer was admirably frank about what the strategy was, and what it should be going forward, now that the Republicans control the national legislature. As for Obamacare, a symbolic abolition that Obama will immediately veto is less important than multiple rapid-fire measures to kill it with a thousand cuts. Repeal of the medical device tax. Repeal of the individual mandate. Repeal of the employer mandate. Repeal of the coverage mandate, thereby reinstating Obama&amp;#039;s broken promise that &amp;quot;If you like your health-care plan, you can keep it.&amp;quot; And repeal the federal bailout for insurers on the Obamacare exchanges. And the federal courts were always the essential fail-safe mechanism for this extended scheme. And now they&amp;#039;ve come into play. Roberts gave the law a reprieve, but he did so by slipping it a slow acting poison which people like &amp;quot;Bobby&amp;quot; Jindal and Rick Perry were more than happy to administer to their more politically insignificant constituents. The ramifications of a ruling against the administration and the ACA are too brutally comical to contemplate -- a significant percentage of 4.7 million people would lose their insurance because they lost their subsidies, and then they would be subject to fines because they don&amp;#039;t have insurance. (Of course, the IRS under this president could decline to collect the fines, but the Republicans would scream bloody murder, reopen their fantastical conspiracy theories about the Obama IRS, and likely sue.) This was already a pretty terrible week. It just got worse. Sociopathy gets its day in court, riding on the backs of the Moops. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a30665/the-lingering-death-of-health-care-reform/>