King v. Burwell: Obama Pounds the Table to Distract Attention from His Lawbreaking

There is an old lawyers’ adage: “When the facts are on your side, argue the facts. When the law is on your side, argue the law. When neither are on your side, pound the table.” President Obama will deliver a speech today in which he pounds the table with the supposed successes of the Affordable Care Act. The address is part effort to influence the Supreme Court’s upcoming decision in King v. Burwell, part effort to spin a potential loss in that case.

The problem is, those supposed successes are not due to the ACA. They are the product, two federal courts have found, of billions of dollars of illegal taxes, borrowing, and spending imposed by the IRS at the behest of the president’s political appointees.

The president can pound the table all he wants about his theories of what Congress intended, or how, in his opinion, those illegal taxes have benefited America. No speech can change the fact that he signed into law a health care bill that makes it unmistakably clear that those taxes and subsidies are only available “through an Exchange established by the State.” If he didn’t like that part of the bill, he shouldn’t have signed it.

The president thinks it is “a contorted reading of the statute” to insist on the unmistakably clear distinction Congress drew between Exchanges established by "States" versus the federal government. The Congressional Research Service disagrees. So do the D.C. Circuit, and even the Fourth Circuit. Even Harvard law professor Noah Feldman says the president’s theories “seem forced.”

Two federal courts have found the law is clear, and the president is on the wrong side of it. The president would rather that you not focus on that small detail. But the Supreme Court’s job is to hold the president to the law he enacted. Let’s hope they do. Because if the Court instead allows the IRS to tax and spend without congressional authorization, the disruption will be much greater than any caused by ObamaCare.