There won't be much applause for Chief Justice John Roberts on this stinker of a case.
David King is one of the four plaintiffs in
King v. Burwell, the Obamacare challenge the Supreme Court will hear next month. In addition to being a
rabid hater of President Obama who spends much of his free time posting about his Obama hate on social media, King is also a Vietnam veteran, and his status as such makes him eligible for veterans health benefits. That access to free health care from the government throws into question
his ability to challenge the law, according to a report in
The Wall Street Journal.
The premise of the suit is that, as Virginia residents, King and his fellow plaintiffs should not be able to qualify for subsidies because, in their convoluted reading of the law, the subsidies should not be available to them. That's because, they say, Congress restricted the subsidies just to the states that set up their own exchanges, which Virginia didn't do. Because they shouldn't be eligible for subsidies, they argue that the subsidies harm them by making the health insurance affordable. The subsidies shouldn't be available to them, they argue, and because they can get the credits, that makes insurance affordable and that makes them subject to either having to buy the insurance or pay a fine for not getting it. Except, it turns out, King doesn't have to get any insurance at all because he can get medical for free from the Department of Veterans Affairs. And he's not the only of the four plaintiffs with standing issues.
In an interview at his home here, Mr. King said he had been to a VA medical center and had a VA identification card, which typically serves as proof of VA-care enrollment.
Legal experts say the fact that Mr. King could avoid paying the penalty for lacking insurance by enrolling in VA coverage undermines his legal right to bring the case, known as "standing." The wife of a second plaintiff has described her husband on social media as being a Vietnam veteran. The government previously questioned the standing of a third plaintiff on the grounds that her income may exempt her from paying the penalty for lacking insurance, but a lower court didn’t address the issue.
So three of the four plaintiffs likely don't have standing in the case. The problem, legal experts say, is that only one of the four needs standing in order for the suit to go before the court. The fourth, Brenda Levy, is a 64-year-old substitute teacher. In another year she'll be eligible for Medicare, so she wouldn't have standing then, either. But this isn't enough to toss the case. It does, however, show just how much of a sham case this is, demonstrating just how far the right-wing groups bankrolling the case had to go in scraping the bottom of the barrel to find anyone to be the face of the suit.
David Levine, a professor at the University of California Hastings College of the Law, said new questions about the plaintiffs' legal standing wouldn't prevent the Supreme Court from reaching the merits of the case, so long as one of the four challengers has a valid legal claim for it to proceed.
He added, "If you can't find better plaintiffs than these people, it does show you how hard it is to find someone who is genuinely hurt."
The case is becoming increasingly toxic for the plaintiffs, and at the same time
increasingly toxic for the Supreme Court. This latest revelation won't end this challenge, but it ill make it even harder for the court's conservatives to look like anything but pure partisans if they gut the law.