Rush Limbaugh: Don't Know Much About the Law

     As I divulged in my previous post, I am like all real liberals on cloud nine over this verdict and want to party much better even than in 1999-as the GOP killed the Clinton healthcare initiative-but that I have decided to take Rush Limbaugh out to dinner. He can talk about how this is a disaster and eventually, someday, American will wake up.

    http://diaryofarepublicanhater.blogspot.com/2015/06/so-how-do-you-plan-to-celebrate.html

    Hey for once I will enjoy hearing him vent. However, one thing he's been saying, while hilarious is just flat wrong. He's claiming that this was not a sound legal decision.

    "What I'm saying is, I don't know. What is paramount and what is obvious is, the law was not used in rendering this decision. You cannot look at the statute, you cannot use law as your guiding principle and arrive at the decision the majority arrived at in this case. You have to do something else. You have to look at politics. In fact, listen to what the chief justice of the US Supreme Court, Judge Roberts, Justice Roberts, said."

     "He said that these words about the state can only get subsidies in a state, he said, "The words must be understood as part of a larger statutory plan. In this instance," he wrote, and this is from his opinion -- "in this instance, the context and structure of Obamacare compel us to depart from what would otherwise be the most natural reading of the pertinent statutory phrase."

     "Let me translate that for you. What the chief justice of the United States is saying: In this instance, we are going to interpret what we think they meant in the statute using connect and structure, and in so doing we are going to ignore what we would normally do, and that is rule statutorily. It's a tantamount admission that the law was not the determining or deciding factor here. And then the chief justice wrote this: "Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them." Wait a minute, now. That's not a legal interpretation in any way."

 http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/daily/2015/06/25/we_have_what_the_authoritarian_monarch_leftists_have_always_wanted_the_corruption_of_our_government_is_complete_with_this_disastrous_obamacare_ruling

     Justice Roberts was very clear about this today-this is how you have to interpret words in a statue according to the whole of the statute. Limbaugh seems to think that there is something sinister in the idea that the SJC would try to do more than just interpret a few words or a sentence disembodied without any context but rather with respect to the entire text. 

    As for intent, this is always a central concern. The idea that the Court should interpret rather than make the law means you have to make a good faith effort to figure out what it's most likely that Congress' wishes were in crafting language. 

   This is not in anyway new. It's the standard way to do legal analysis. Take a totally different issue-Major League Baseball's antitrust exemption. This initial ruling was made in 1924. In the 50s the SJC clearly felt that the ruling was a relic of an older legal tradition but didn't overturn it because Congress hadn't acted. 

  They read Congress' inaction as meaning that they may have intended for baseball to have its exemption. So deference to Congress' likely intent is a cornerstone of American jurisprudence. As Rush doesn't know this he clearly doesn't know much about the law.