by Dish Staff
It appears we’ve passed it:
A new George Washington University “Battleground” poll shows that, on the list of things that people think are wrong with this country, Obamacare actually ranks pretty low. As in behind-“other” low. The poll shows seven in 10 likely voters think the country is off on the wrong track. But unlike other pollsters, it then asked a follow-up question about why people were unhappy. Of the 70 percent who said the country was off on the wrong track, just 5 percent offered a reason having to do with Obamacare. In other words, only about 3.5 percent of all Americans think Obamacare is the bane of American existence right now.
Chait passes along other good news for the ACA – the DC Circuit court will re-hear Halbig:
The short explanation of what this means is that it has closed off the easiest path to crippling Obamacare. … What happens next is that the entire D.C. Circuit will hear the case. Since the logic of the lawsuit is so ludicrous only a wildly partisan Republican jurist would ever accept it, it stands zero chance of success.
Jason Millman unpacks the news:
The entire D.C. circuit is expected to uphold subsidies through the federal-run exchanges, which would eliminate conflicting decisions in the appellate courts. That makes it less likely that the Supreme Court will eventually take the subsidy challenges, though the justices can still decide to do so.
Cohn also eyes SCOTUS:
Most legal experts I know think the justices will, at the very least, wait to see how the full D.C. Circuit rules before taking the lawsuits seriously. The D.C. Circuit rehearing is set for November and that court probably won’t issue a ruling until spring or summer of next year. If those judges end up reversing the decision, the Supreme Court justices might pass on the case altogether, although two other cases are in much earlier stages of the judicial process and could still produce conflicting rulings. As Andrew Koppelman, a constitutional law expert at Northwestern University, notes, “If the Court was going to blow up Obamacare, it would have done so in the big case in 2012. After Roberts paid a big political cost for doing that, why would he now adopt this hyper-technical and unpersuasive legal argument, yanking away benefits that a lot of people are already receiving?”
But remember: It takes only four Supreme Court justices to vote in favor of hearing a case. We know, from that 2012 Obamacare case, that four conservative justices were prepared to throw out not just the individual mandate but also the rest of the law.
The Dish 