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The Constitution is . . . yawn . . . under assault again

Yesterday at National Review I saw yet another denunciation of Joe Biden's savage assault on the Constitution. The guy is taking a torch to it! The country is doomed if he keeps it up!

Sadly, I had run out of my free access to NR articles for the month—seems a little early for that, doesn't it?—so I wasn't able to find out what the latest outrage against law and morals was. Not from NR, anyway. Fortunately, a quick bit of googling informed me that our current constitutional crisis is over something called the "family glitch."

As it turns out, the family glitch is so complicated I'm not sure I understand it. But apparently the fix is designed to allow family members to receive Obamacare subsidies even if one family member is covered by an employer plan. I'm not sure why this was an issue before, but I gather it's yet another one of the sloppy drafting errors that seems to have infected the entire law.

Anyway, the IRS has changed its rules to allow uncovered family members to receive Obamacare subsidies if they qualify by income. It will help about 5 million people.

Republicans are up in arms about this. It defies the plain reading of the law. The IRS is only doing it under political pressure from Biden. It's all part of the Democratic plan to shred the Constitution and seize the power to . . .

what? Help a few people get cheaper health insurance, I guess. The fiends.

POSTSCRIPT: This will be resolved, as usual, by a tedious court case that will probably take a few years. In the end, maybe it will turn out to be unconstitutional. But we'll all survive regardless.

15 thoughts on “The Constitution is . . . yawn . . . under assault again

  1. Austin

    But apparently it's designed to not allow family members to receive Obamacare subsidies even if one family member is covered by an employer plan.

    The family glitch was that - in order to make Obamacare get a better CBO score - families that have a single member getting employer insurance no longer qualify for Obamacare subsidies to buy insurance, even if the employer charges thousands of dollars a month to add family members. It’s not that hard to understand, Kevin.

  2. Doctor Jay

    You know, when you rely on hyperbolic language and assertions to get attention to your political positions you are on a treadmill. It's a "boy who cried wolf" dynamic, the same claims lose force, so you are forced into an escalation of language and rhetoric.

  3. Ken Rhodes

    "Unconstitutional" has become a catch-all word meaning "I don't like it and I think it might be violating something or other."

    So I have adopted a "show me" policy. Whenever I hear someone use that epithet, my response is, "You might be right. Please tell me the Article number, Section number, and Clause number, and the specific words you think have been violated, so I can verify for myself that you are right."

    That tends to produce a pause, followed by, "Oh, never mind."

  4. PaulDavisThe1st

    > Sadly, I had run out of my free access to NR articles for the month

    Find the cookie manager in your browser. Delete all cookies related to the NR domain. Done.

    1. bouncing_b

      Or use a browser that doesn't store cookies in the first place: Brave. Always works on sites like this. Just quit Brave when a site says you've used up your articles, then reopen with a fresh start.

  5. JonF311

    What am I missing here? I thought ACA subsidies were based on one's income, not on family relationships (beyond the obvious ones of spouses, minor children and college student children up through 26)

  6. Citizen Lehew

    There's really only one play in the conservative playbook:
    1) Always attack the other guys for what you are doing. The more ridiculous attack the better, since it makes their attacks on you look equivalent.

    So yea, they're actively trying to dismantle the constitution. Of course they have to flood the airwaves with Biden's "assault" on the constitution. He said she said, nothing to see here.

  7. Michael Friedman

    I'm curious if you will be so blase if the second Trump Administration is this cavalier about following the plain letter of the law when that gets in the way of Trump's priorities.

    1. Jasper_in_Boston

      I think we would all be overjoyed if the next Republican administration exhibited the same regard for the constitution as the current administration does. But the probability that such a scenario will transpire is functionally zero.

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