THE PRESSURE NOW SHIFTS FROM REPUBLICANS IN CONGRESS TO THE REPUBLICAN PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATES TO SAVE US FROM OBAMACARE: My take on King v. Burwell: However King was decided, the future of American health care was going to come down to 2016:
One consolation is that, were President Obama to have vetoed whatever the Republicans would have proposed, nothing good would happen until after the next election, which is where things now stand. Now Congressional Republicans cannot be bull-rushed into simply extending the subsidies to federal exchanges, while implicitly accepting the rest of the ACA, which is how things were shaping up. Now the voters will truly get at least one more crack at saving American health care from Obamacare. (And, with the health care cases in mind, candidates can debate the sort of justices they will nominate to the Court.)
Supporters of the law have already telegraphed that their next move is to end the political debate by urging a Pax Obamacare to which all Americans must acquiesce. Last week the president said, after “five years in, what we are talking about it is no longer just a law. It’s no longer just a theory. This isn’t even just about the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare . . . This is now part of the fabric of how we care for one another.”
While the ACA is certainly the “law of the land,” as it has been since its enactment, nothing in the Court’s decision today imparts any additional legitimacy on this law as a public policy meriting political acquiescence. To borrow from the president’s words, it is still “just a law.” So nothing in this decision should deter Republican presidential and congressional candidates in the 2016 election from continuing to press their campaign to “repeal and replace” Obamacare.
RELATED: 2016 GOP Presidential Hopefuls: Now It’s Up To Us To Repeal Obamacare. The candidates are impressively united on this issue.
Cross posted on The Volokh Conspiracy.