King attorneys Michael Carvin (L) and Scott Pruitt (R) eye the imaginary lawmakers who will provide a fix for the Affordable Care Act.
Following the
King v. Burwell arguments today, the lawyers who argued to dismantle the law in 34 states assured reporters that fixes were right around the corner in those states if Obamacare fell.
Here's Michael Carvin, who argued the case for plaintiffs today:
It seems that the leaders in Congress are well prepared to deal with any transition issues and I assume the states, if they don't, will have every incentive to go ahead and create the exchanges that they would have created but for the IRS's contravention of the law.
Then there's Oklahoma Attorney General Scott Pruitt, who filed an initial challenge to the law's subsidies in 2012:
Now the policy implications of a victory are significant, but as Michael has indicated, both the states and the federal government stand ready to respond to whatever policy implication may occur by the court doing what the statute intended.
Carvin and Pruitt must totally have the 411 that everyone else is missing, cuz last I checked, top government officials
in at least nine states either had no interest or saw no path to providing a fix for their constituents. As for federal lawmakers, not a single Republican has offered the outlines of anything concrete in either
the Senate or
the House.
So far, Republicans have done little more than write two op-eds about a replacement law. Just for the sake of comparison, the actual law runs about 900 pages and took more than a year to finalize. And that was when the Democrats were running the show.
Let's face it, the Homeland Security debacle of the last couple weeks gave us a taste of just how capable this GOP-led Congress is of accomplishing anything significant. The House, however, might manage a 57th vote to repeal Obamacare—that will surely help the eight million people who would be stripped of their health coverage if the plaintiffs in King prevail.