This morning, Joan McCarter posted a diary which notes the recent Wall St. Journal / Mother Jones* revelations that the actual plaintiffs in the infamous King v. Burwell case, set to be argued in front of the Supreme Court next month, are a motley crew of people who can't actually claim any "harm" from the law (and one of which doesn't even seem to know how she became a plaintiff in the first place).
*(as an aside, how often do you see the WSJ and MoJo writing breaking stories about the same subject, from the same perspective?)
I just posted my own take. While much of it is a rehash of the same points Joan and Mother Jones make, there's one additional point I've noted which doesn't seem to have come up in either piece:
Last spring, the Koch Brothers-funded Obamacare attack ads from featured a series of sob stories which ranged from utter bullsh*t to vastly exaggerated (featuring "victims" who, by an amazing coincidence, just happened to also be heavily involved with Republican party operations or, even more blatantly, actors pretending to non-existent people "suffering" from the eeeeevils of Obamacare).
As Steve Benen noted at the time:
Remember, if “Obamacare” were really so awful, it’d be incredibly easy to find legitimate horror stories that stood up well to scrutiny. Indeed, ACA “victims” would be everywhere, eager to tell their story.
The fact that these attack ads are so routinely – and so easily – discredited speaks volumes.
The King v. Burwell case fits exactly the same pattern. The Koch Bros/CATO/AEI/CEI/GOP alphabet soup searched far and wide to find someone, anyone who could remotely fit the legal requirements to claim to have been "harmed" by the Affordable Care Act (specifically the tax credits provided to reduce the cost of healthcare coverage for those very people), andthis is the best they could come up with (trust me, it's rather jaw-dropping...read the whole thing).
In completely unrelated news, total private healthcare policy enrollments via the ACA exchanges should cross 10.5 million today.
UPDATE: Several people have noted in the comments that "harm" isn't the issue here, but "standing" by the legal definition of the word. This completely misses my point.
Yes, the "plaintiffs" may techncially speaking have "standing" here...but that doesn't change the fact that it's a pathetically thin argument. Again, if the federal subsidies were actually impacting people negatively, there should be plenty of people for the King plaintiffs to choose from...people who a) aren't already eligible for government healthcare via the VA; b) aren't on the verge of becoming eligible via Medicare; c) do have a high enough income that they wouldn't qualify for a hardship exepmption; d) don't necessarily already have a massive bias against the Obama administration to start with; and e) actually were aware of the fact that they were plaintiffs in a federal case and agree with the consequences of the case in the event that they were to win it.