Healthcare!

Roberts writes.

Subsidies are available!

Big sigh of relief.

Chaos avoided.

"This means that individuals who get their health insurance through an exchange established by the federal government will be eligible for tax subsidies."

The government wins. The Chief is joined by Kennedy, Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan. Scalia has a dissenting opinion.

And now this means that only another opinion by Roberts can come out today. But no, that's it for today. The rest, including same-sex marriage, will come tomorrow.

Here's the PDF of the opinion.

ADDED: The majority says that Chevron deference — which asks only "whether the agency’s interpretation is reasonable" — has never applied applied "in extraordinary cases," where there's reason to "hesitate before concluding that Congress has intended" to delegate to the agency the authority to "fill in the statutory gaps." Here, the tax credits are "key reforms, involving billions of dollars," with big "economic and political significance," and the agency making the decision is the IRS, which "no expertise in crafting health insurance policy."

Without Chevron deference, it's the Court's job to say for itself what the statute means.

The losing side in this case rested heavily on the argument that the statute was clear (that there were no subsidies for states that didn't set up their own exchanges and left it to the feds to set up exchanges), but the majority found ambiguity. It blamed Congress for "inartful drafting," for writing "key parts of the Act behind closed doors, rather than through 'the traditional legislative process,'" and for using "reconcilation" instead of leaving the bill open to debate and amendment.  In a sly reference to Nancy Pelosi's "we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it," Chief Justice Roberts quotes an old Felix Frankfurter article — "Some Reflections on the Reading of Statutes, "47 Colum. L. Rev. 527, 545 (1947) — that described a cartoon "in which a senator tells his colleagues 'I admit this new bill is too complicated to understand. We’ll just have to pass it to find out what it means.'").

Since the text is ambiguous, the Court looks at the statute's "broader structure" for meaning, and the need to prevent the "death spiral" determines the outcome. The Court rejects the idea that Congress intended dire consequences, that it wanted to make an offer the states couldn't refuse, because Congress "expressly addressed what would happen if a State did refuse the deal."

AND: Justice Scalia dissents, joined by Justices Thomas and Alito. He finds clarity in the key phrase and proclaims: "Words no longer have meaning if an Exchange that is not established by a State is 'established by the State.'" He accuses the majority of "interpretive jiggery-pokery" in pursuit of "the overriding principle": "The Affordable Care Act must be saved."

The Court’s decision reflects the philosophy that judges should endure whatever interpretive distortions it takes in order to correct a supposed flaw in the statutory machinery.... We lack the prerogative to repair laws that do not work out in practice, just as the people lack the ability to throw us out of office if they dislike the solutions we concoct....

It is not our place to judge the quality of the care and deliberation that went into this or any other law. A law enacted by voice vote with no deliberation whatever is fully as binding upon us as one enacted after years of study, months of committee hearings, and weeks of debate. Much less is it our place to make everything come out right when Congress does not do its job properly. It is up to Congress to design its laws with care, and it is up to the people to hold them to account if they fail to carry out that responsibility....