Tuesday’s New York Times piece on how the problematic phrase “established by the state” got into and stayed in the Affordable Care Act provoked a great many blasts from lefty bloggers at the plaintiffs’ case in King v. Burwell. Two especially heated posts came from MSNBC’s Steve Benen and Esquire’s Charles Pierce.
Benen, a producer for The Rachel Maddow Show and the primary writer for the show’s blog, claimed that almost no one believes there’s any merit to the plaintiffs’ case: “There are effectively two competing factions: those who acknowledge that the litigation is hopelessly insane, and those who know the case is hopelessly insane but pretend otherwise for the sake of appearances...The case [conservatives are] pushing…is based entirely on a lie.”
It could be, Benen added, that the right is benefiting from a misguided but possibly widespread “assumption that the ‘real’ truth lies somewhere between what the left and right are arguing”:
I simply lack the words to fully convey how wrong this assumption is in a case like this. Even proponents of the King case itself must realize that they’re pushing a con that’s so brazen, it’s genuinely insulting to anyone with the slightest grasp of reality.
I’m 42 and I’ve followed politics closely for as long as I can remember. I’ve never [seen] anything quite as idiotic as this.
Meanwhile, Pierce charged that the case emerged from a conservative “alternate universe” sustained by “wingnut welfare” (bolding added):
King v. Burwell…has tested sorely the country's appetite for ideological farce. From the basic facts of the lawsuit…to the forum-shopping, to the farcical gathering of plaintiffs, this whole exercise was developed and promoted entirely within the universe of movement conservatism. It is wholly a production of wingnut welfare. It is being argued by people who have come up through that system. It was upheld by judges who were trained within that system. And the plaintiffs are banking on Supreme Court justices who were raised up in that universe to deliver a purely ideological decision, thereby lighting what is left of the Court's credibility on fire…
The case itself is preposterous, a creature of the alternate universe of conservative epistemic closure come to blunder around in the lives of real people with real problems.
