A recently surfaced 2010 quote from one of the major funders behind the latest legal challenge to Obamacare perfectly encapsulates the ends-justify-the-means ethos that is driving the litigation.
The Competitive Enterprise Institute is helping to pay for the lawsuit, Halbig v. Burwell, which seeks to invalidate Obamacare’s tax subsidies being offered on the federal health insurance exchange, HealthCare.gov. In 2010, CEI chairman Michael Greve made plain that anything should be done to stop the law. “I do not care how it’s done,” he said at the time. “I don’t care who does it.”
Here is what Greve said at a 2010 conference hosted by the conservative American Enterprise Institute, where Greve is an adjunct scholar, as The New York Times’s Linda Greenhouse reported this week:
“This bastard has to be killed as a matter of political hygiene. I do not care how this is done, whether it’s dismembered, whether we drive a stake through its heart, whether we tar and feather it and drive it out of town, whether we strangle it. I don’t care who does it, whether it’s some court some place, or the United States Congress. Any which way, any dollar spent on that goal is worth spending, any brief filed toward that end is worth filing, any speech or panel contribution toward that end is of service to the United States.”
The quote seems particularly revealing in the wake of the Halbig lawsuit, which most dismissed as a legal long shot until a federal appeals court ruled in its favor last month. It could now head to the Supreme Court, putting the law’s fate in the hands of the nation’s highest court for the second time since its passage.
It was considered a long shot because almost everybody who was there at the time — reporters, legislators and accountants — agreed that the rationale behind the lawsuit was absurd. The challengers argued that Congress had always meant to prohibit subsidies on the federal exchange, which would now strip more than 4 million people of financial help. The evidence — aside from some admittedly poor drafting — seemed negligible to non-existent in many observers’ eyes.
Those advancing the lawsuit, and some of their allies in the conservative media, have contorted their own understanding of the law into something that seems unrecognizable to those who spent months creating and covering it. It has left a number of liberal commentators baffled. But in the context of Greve’s professed vendetta against Obamacare, it makes a bit more sense.
One other comment from Greve during that 2010 panel seems particularly prescient. Back then, the individual mandate was the top legal target for those seeking to stop Obamacare. But Greve encouraged opponents, even before the Supreme Court upheld the mandate in 2012, to focus on “bits and pieces” of the law to stop it. And now, what many regard as a typo or poor drafting threatens to undo Obamacare.
“I think this is the right way to go,” Greve said, “to concentrate on bits and pieces of this law beyond the mandate.”
Image via this video of the AEI conference. Greve’s comments begin around the 1-hour, 30-minute mark.
Well, that was a somewhat misleading headline. Maybe I’ll call next March and pretend I’m from the Pulitzer Prize Board with some really good news for you.
Why does this f**** think he has the right to determine people’s ability to receive healthcare and proper treatment?
If you ask me, and nobody ever does BTW, this man needs to be the one who is stopped, any of the ways he listed for the ACA would be appropriate for him and others of his evil ilk.
Who, what, when, where and why? In this case Scott reports the who, what, when and where parts but forgets about why.
Why did Greve think Obamacare had to be killed? Was there money in it for him?
I have been baffled for years which conservative constituency would benefit by killing Obamacare. I still am.
All I can say is that some people are truly evil. Wanting to take health care from millions of people is evil. If the SCOTUS sides with this man than there is no justice in this world. Millionaires and billionaires not only want to keep workers down, but want to make sure they have no health care too. I mean the SCOTUS is already saying corporations have the right to tell women what health care they can and cannot get. How much worse can it get. From the looks of things a whole lot worse.