6-27-15 Hodgepodge

Call It SCOTUScare?

Via HBL, I learned of the following excerpt from Justice Antonin Scalia's dissenting opinion in King vs. Burwell:

Today's opinion changes the usual rules of statutory interpretation for the sake of the Affordable Care Act. . . . Having transformed two major parts of the law, the Court today has turned its attention to a third. The Act that Congress passed makes tax credits available only on an "Exchange established by the State." This Court, however, concludes that this limitation would prevent the rest of the Act from working as well as hoped. So it rewrites the law to make tax credits available everywhere. We should start calling this law SCOTUScare.

I'm tempted to concur: To call this sloppily-written, unread, not-really-passed "law" "ObamaCare" risks doing too great an honor to a scoundrel who should have been foiled the first time (not counting "passage" by reconciliation), by the very outfit that has now saved it thrice.

Weekend Reading

"... as these avoidances pile up, life can be consumed with irrational fears and become a life not fully lived ..." -- Michael Hurd, in "Irrational Fears + Magical Thinking = Trouble" at The Delaware Wave

"As they spout off, they are admitting, albeit implicitly, that they are not able or willing to figure out what's true anyway, so all that matters is that they look like they know what they're talking about." -- Michael Hurd, in "Those Delightful Contrarian Know-It-Alls" at The Delaware Coast Press

Words Still Mean Things to Some

Scott Holleran comments on a particularly effective example of rational persuasion that made the news recently. Taylor Swift recently published an open letter urging Apple to pay musicians royalties for music its customers obtain from the multimedia giant's newest music service:

... Swift explains that Apple's new Apple Music streaming service precludes payment to artists in the first three months. Swift argues that this is wrong. In a persuasive, simple letter implicitly based on egoism, not altruism, because she predicates the letter on achieving her own values in an explicit expression of magnanimity, Swift makes the case for what amounts to intellectual property rights...

As Holleran implies, a great virtue of Swift's open letter is that it shows rather than tells its intended audience why it should change its mind.

As I said Thursday of another Supreme Court decision, "[T]he real fight for government protection of individual rights is a fight for minds within the voting public and over the long haul, and not in a few isolated court rooms." With the Supreme Court failing us yet again, seeing Taylor Swift winning minds is a much-needed dose of encouragement.

Read the whole thing, and the letter itself (linked within), for that matter.

-- CAV