Scalia: We are not Congress’s Editors
The law was passed in a great hurry, he explains, and refers to an old cartoon — cited in a 1947 article by Justice Felix Frankfurter on the reading of statutes — “in which a senator tells his colleagues: ‘I admit this new bill is too complicated to understand. We’ll just have to pass it to find out what it means.’ ”
.. There are also two citations that quietly hoist Scalia and his fellow dissenters, Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Clarence Thomas, with their own petards. Roberts quotes a majority opinion written last year by Scalia stating that “the words of a statute must be read in their context and with a view to their place in the overall statutory scheme.” And arguing that “it is implausible” that Congress meant to create health care exchanges without subsidies, given the likelihood that they would collapse under those circumstances, he quotes a dissent that Scalia, Thomas and Alito wrote in the 2012 Obamacare challenge (joined then by Kennedy): “Without the federal subsidies . . . the exchanges would not operate as Congress intended and may not operate at all.” Give the man debater’s points for that one.
.. Scalia answers this way: The court is not Congress’s editor. It’s not the justices’ job to rewrite a bad draft.