I’d like to get your feedback on the comments system at TPM. We’re discussing now in this thread at The Hive (sub req). Thanks for your help.
George W. says 50-50 chance Jeb runs for president in 2016.
A couple of political scientists got in some hot water when their exit poll experiment which asked South Carolina voters a series of question meant to assess negative or positive feelings toward African Americans. Like “Do you think African-Americans are too demanding in their push for equal rights?” But this wasn’t the Klan University asking the questions. It was an effort to see whether measurable racial or racist ideas affected whether a voter voted for Tim Scott or Lindsey Graham, both of whom won reelection to the Senate on Tuesday.
I’d love to encourage TPM readers to take a moment to read a heart-wrenching excerpt from Paper Love: Searching for the Girl My Grandfather Left Behind by Sarah Wildman. It’s a fantastic book, and the excerpt, about the correspondence between her grandfather and those seeking to get Valy out of the Reich. Back then, $300 was an insurmountable sum for a recent immigrant. It’s a fascinating read.
Two month search and mystery over the fate of 43 missing students in Mexico ends with drug gang confessions that all were killed, bodies burned and pulverized.
You can’t assess the Supreme Court’s surprise jump today into the Obamacare subsidies pseudo-controversy without appreciating that there was a big organized effort in the conservative legal community to create the political and legal space for the Supreme Court to intervene. Part of that effort involved working to delegitimize in advance the pending en banc decision of the DC Circuit Court of Appeals as purely political and without legal foundation. Here’s the full rundown on what was being done on the outside to push the Supreme Court toward the decision it made today.
Our full story on the Supreme Court’s big Obamacare move this afternoon.
The Supreme Court in a surprise move has decided to take up the issue of whether the tax subsidies that are essential to the Obamacare economic model are available on the federal exchanges. The tendentious argument from Obamacare opponents is that the law itself, in one obscure provision, only provides for subsidies on exchanges set up by states — even though that was clearly not what the law as whole means or what Obamacare proponents in Congress or the White House intended. So just to be clear, this is a very significant legal attack on the law, even though it was a laughable line of attack when it was first initiated.
Today’s move by the Supreme Court is a surprise because the full DC Circuit Court of Appeals is about to review the same issue in the Halbig case. Oral arguments are scheduled in Halbig next month. Nothing is certain, of course, but the full DC Circuit is expected to reverse an early decision of a three-judge panel that invalidated the subsidies. So that was supposed to be the next big legal decision on the issue.
But in the meantime, anti-Obamacare plaintiffs in another similar case asked the Supreme Court to review the decision of the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals which upheld the subsidies. That case, King v. Burwell, is what the Supreme Court agreed to take today.
Here’s the rub.
I’m doing a Reddit AMA at 1 PM eastern. Stop by at this link.