RUTHFULLY YOURS

Shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court issued its ruling in King v. Burwell on Thursday, President Obama made a statement that began, “Five years ago, after nearly a century of talk, decades of trying, a year of bipartisan debate — we finally declared that in America, health care is not a privilege for a few, but a right for all.”

That phrase, “we finally declared,” is perhaps more telling than the president meant it to be — a tacit admission that what congressional Democrats did by passing the Affordable Care Act in 2010 was something less than create new law. They expressed a desire, declared their desire to be law, and told the Department of Health and Human Services and the Internal Revenue Service to make it so.

Thus, when 34 states declined to set up a health-insurance exchange in accordance with the ACA, and HHS was obliged at the last minute to cobble something together in all those states, the IRS simply declared that an exchange “established by the state” could also refer to something quite different: an exchange established by HHS. It was a convenient and seemingly painless way to solve a problem that had cropped up. If subsidies were allowed only on exchanges created by states (as the ACA rather plainly stated) and not on those set up by HHS, then millions of people would not be able to afford very expensive ACA-compliant health coverage. You need subsidies to afford those plans, after all. Something had to be done. So the IRS took care of it and the Supreme Court said, okay.

I​ n a blistering dissent from the majority in King v. Burwell this morning, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said President Obama’s signature domestic policy achievement should be called “SCOTUScare” rather than Obamacare, in light of how many times Chief Justice John Roberts has intervened to protect the law from a crippling legal defeat.

Scalia argued that Roberts rewrote the law twice in 2012, and has now done so a third time in his King decision, which allows the IRS to continue providing subsidies to people who purchase insurance in the federal government’s health-care exchange.

“The somersaults of statutory interpretation they have performed (‘penalty’ means tax, ‘further [Medicaid] payments to the State’ means only incremental Medicaid payments to the State, ‘established by the State’ means not established by the State) will be cited by litigants endlessly, to the confusion of honest jurisprudence,” Scalia wrote in his dissent. “And the cases will publish forever the discouraging truth that the Supreme Court of the United States favors some laws over others, and is prepared to do whatever it takes to uphold and assist its favorites.”

It’s been stabbed in the back, set on fire, drowned, and buried six feet under. But like the traditional horror-movie slasher, the Democratic party’s favorite political trope is slowly clawing its way back to the surface.​

In other words, the “War on Women” is back. Despite its inability to turn out Democratic voters in 2014, Hillary Clinton’s team is digging up the strategy this election cycle. If early barbs are any indication, Republican candidates should prepare for a vicious, scorched-earth campaign that eschews critiques on equal pay and abortion for comparisons to rapacious jihadists. Whether the intensified attacks will prove more effective with a woman at the helm remains an open question.

A recent hit by Hillary’s campaign manager on two GOP hopefuls shows that the Clinton camp is already putting on the brass knuckles. At a New York City women’s summit in April, as part of a larger comment touching on women’s liberty worldwide, Hillary seemed to suggest that Americans with a religious objection to abortion should be forced to surrender to progressive views on the subject. “Far too many women are denied access to reproductive health care and safe childbirth, and laws don’t count for much if they’re not enforced,” she said. “And deep-seated cultural codes, religious beliefs, and structural biases have to be changed.”

David and Jonah are obviously right that the immoral rules of engagement (ROE) the commander-in-chief has imposed on our troops have encouraged Islamic State jihadists to endanger civilians – not that terrorists need much encouragement in that regard. As David observes, this turns the laws of armed combat on their head.

I’ve been venting about this for a number of years now. The driving purpose of international humanitarian law is the protection of civilians. What makes honorable combatants honorable, and what triggers the international-law protections they are owed if captured, is their adherence to venerable standards requiring that they, among other things, identify themselves as soldiers, carry their weapons openly, and confine their combat operations to legitimate military objectives.

The Supreme Court’s breathtaking upholding of the constitutionality of Obamacare’s exchanges wasn’t the only case they got badly wrong Thursday. In both cases, ordinary Americans may be hurt in ways they don’t yet realize.In its second case yesterday, the Supreme Court had to decide the scope of the Fair Housing Act, a law passed in 1968 that makes it unlawful to discriminate on the basis of race and other factors in connection with the sale or lease of housing. The question before the court was: Can you be found guilty of racial discrimination if you never engaged in policies that had any intent to discriminate?

It is a desperate attempt by the French government to buy a few more days of quiet from its Muslim community, especially from the members of the Muslim Brotherhood and the terrorist organizations to which it gave birth — all waiting for the order to run riot through the streets of France.

If it succeeds, may Allah prevent it, it will lead to an ISIS and Hamas takeover of every inch of Palestinian soil from which Israel withdraws if coerced by the initiative.

It is evidently too frustrating and unrewarding just to sit in the U.N. and not think of some project supposedly to spread beneficence that could make your country look important to the other 190 members — even if this beneficence is lethal to its recipient.

This week’s Supreme Court ruling sets up the 2016 presidential election perfectly for Republicans.

The one fun part of this week’s Supreme Court decision on ObamaCare is that it has given the country a new way to evaluate everything Democrats say. Take Barack Obama’s pronouncement Thursday that the court’s ruling in King v. Burwell means “the Affordable Care Act is here to stay.”

Those words are pretty clear. Mr. Obama surely meant them. Yet all we have to do is give them the old Roberts High Court treatment, and—voilà!—we discover the exact opposite meaning. Far from putting this debate behind us, the ruling has freed Washington to take it up. Now that the long months of waiting silently and expectantly for the court’s decision are over, debate on ObamaCare is about to explode in a way not witnessed since 2010.

Emails in question uncovered as part of subpoena from congressional committee to Sidney Blumenthal

The State Department said Thursday that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton didn’t turn over at least 15 emails that appear to be work-related from her personal server, contradicting her claims that all relevant emails were in the hands of the federal government.

The emails in question were uncovered as part of a subpoena from a congressional committee to Sidney Blumenthal, a longtime Clinton confidant and former White House aide in Bill Clinton’s administration.

Overcoming initial doubts, ‘Seinfeld’ became a hit with writing of unparalleled wit and a complete lack of timidity

It’s impossible to think of a television comedy that has rooted itself as deeply in the culture as “Seinfeld” has—no small irony given the grave doubts initially raised about its prospects for success. It was, the chief executive of NBC Entertainment objected when the show was under consideration, “too New York, too Jewish.” Initial tests of its appeal were discouraging.

Still, by the time the series ended its extraordinary nine-year run in 1998, advertisers were paying, as Advertising Age reported, virtually a million dollars a minute for airtime, the sort of rate usually commanded by the Super Bowl but never before by any regularly scheduled TV program. NBC itself was prepared to pay an astronomical sum for a 10th season if Jerry Seinfeld had agreed, but there would be none. The show (which began streaming in its entirety on Hulu this week) ended with a finale in which the by then world-renowned quartet—Jerry, George, Elaine, Kramer—was hauled into court and given a year in prison for callous indifference to humanity.

For the second time in three years, Chief Justice John Roberts has rewritten the Affordable Care Act in order to save it. Beyond its implications for health care, the Court’s 6-3 ruling in King v. Burwell is a landmark that betrays the Chief’s vow to be “an umpire,” not a legislator in robes. He stands revealed as a most political Justice.

The black-letter language of ObamaCare limits insurance subsidies to “an Exchange established by the State.” But the Democrats who wrote the bill in 2010 never imagined that 36 states would refuse to participate. So the White House through the IRS wrote a regulation that also opened the subsidy spigots to exchanges established by the federal government.
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Chief Justice Roberts has now become a co-conspirator in this executive law-making. With the verve of a legislator, he has effectively amended the statute to read “established by the State—or by the way the Federal Government.” His opinion—joined by the four liberal Justices and Anthony Kennedy—is all the more startling because it goes beyond normal deference to regulators.