We Are A Nation of Laws, Not of Big Government Spin

 

IBDEditorials.com

Ordered Liberty: White House and other liberal contempt for a D.C. Circuit panel's ruling isn't just about ObamaCare. Representative government itself is threatened when laws don't mean what they say.

'Does the letter of the law matter to the White House on this?" ABC News' Jon Karl asked White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest after a potentially crippling ruling from the second-highest court in the land against ObamaCare's subsidies for states without exchanges.

Earnest responded that he didn't have a "fancy legal degree," then expounded on Congress' intentions being that everyone get subsidies, whether it be from "federal officials or state officials."

But as Judge Thomas B. Griffith wrote in his Halbig v. Burwell ruling, "asking us to ignore the best evidence of Congress's intent," namely the relevant section of the law, "in favor of assumptions about the risks that Congress would or would not tolerate — assumptions doubtlessly influenced by hindsight" — is asking the court "to substitute our judgment for Congress's. We refuse."

Griffith quoted from a series of Supreme Court decisions, including the unanimous 1987 Rodriquez ruling, which emphasized that "it frustrates rather than effectuates legislative intent simplistically to assume that whatever furthers the statute's primary objective must be the law," because "no legislation pursues its purposes at all costs."

Griffith's conclusion is a ringing defense of the rule of the people through those they vote into power: "Our duty when interpreting a statute is to ascertain the meaning of the words of the statute duly enacted through the formal legislative process.  This limited role serves democratic interests by ensuring that policy is made by elected, politically accountable representatives, not by appointed, life-tenured judges."

Columnist Ezra Klein sneers that this is just judges giving lawmakers "a lesson about grammar," consequences be damned.  A Washington Post editorial complains, "the text is a vague mess and the court's interpretation of the language is at odds with the law's obvious intent and with normal deference to executive interpretation."

The Richmond-based Fourth Circuit's unanimous ruling upholding ObamaCare's subsidies, issued the same day, argues that "denying tax credits to individuals shopping on federal exchanges would throw a debilitating wrench into" ObamaCare's "internal economic machinery" — as if the federal judge's job is to fix badly written laws.

As Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia has noted, "it is simply incompatible with democratic government, or indeed, even with fair government, to have the meaning of a law determined by what the lawgiver meant, rather than what the lawgiver promulgated. That seems to me one step worse than the trick the emperor Nero was said to engage in: posting edicts high up in the pillars, so that they could not easily be read."

The letter of the law is the law.

To believe otherwise is to give tyrannical power not only to unelected judges but also to a handful of legislators who tell us in hindsight what laws passed years ago really intended to do.

Laws are passed by a majority of all members of Congress, and in the case of an overridden presidential veto, supermajorities.

The same principle protects against activist judges looking through floor statements and committee hearing transcripts for supposed hidden meanings not found in the text of the actual laws passed.

We're a nation of laws, not of spinmeisters.