But, if corporate guesses wrong, they end up with a reduced occupancy rate which causes them to drop prices. Consumers do a good, albeit imperfect, job of insuring that suppliers don't stray too far from market.
If presented with a question, the lower courts must address it (even the Supreme Court must as well -- but they can simply, without additional comment, deny a cert petition so, in effect, they only have to address it in the most pedantic meaning of the word).
Sometimes addressing the question may consist of granting a summary judgement which precludes a trial, but the summary judgement includes a rational (sometimes little more than a rubber stamped copy of the movants' petition) for the decision and that decision will almost always involve interpreting the law (including case law). Obviously some of these interpretations are no-brainers (as in the example I gave), but they are interpretations nonetheless.
No (we hope) courts don't "arbitrarily" (re)interpret the law, but many cases do require subtle interpretations of the law and how it should apply even to facts that are not disputed by either party.
You should read the cert petition (a copy of which can be found here). Then you would know that out of tens of thousands of pages of legislation and regulations related to the PPACA (some that have counted assert that there are over 11,000,000 words of regulations related to the PPACA and a little less than 400,000 words in the statute), only one regulation was being questioned and that was based on just a few words in the PPACA itself. The petitioners NEVER asked in this case that the PPACA be discarded.
Since you seem not to have yet mastered simple Google searches, the question presented in the cert petition was:
QUESTION PRESENTED
Section 36B of the Internal Revenue Code, which was enacted as part of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“ACA”), authorizes federal tax credit subsidies for health insurance coverage that is purchased through an “Exchange established by the State under section 1311” of the ACA.
The question presented is whether the Internal Revenue Service (“IRS”) may permissibly promulgate regulations to extend tax-credit subsidies to coverage purchased through Exchanges established by the federal government under section 1321 of the ACA.
Is there ANYTHING then that you think the Federal government isn't allowed to do under the Constitution (except, of course, those things they are specifically prohibited from doing in the Bill of Rights for example).
Does the Constitution allow the Federal government to force you to buy and wear an Apple Watch because the general welfare will benefit both from increasing commerce and avoiding the loss of productive time pulling out one's cell phone to check the time? What if they just tax every human in the US the exact amount of an iPhone6 and a mid-range Apple Watch every two years and then purchase and give each such human an iPhone6 and a mid-range Apple Watch every two years?
There must be SOME limit or would you be good with just getting rid of all state and local governments and bodies such as local school boards and running it all from Washington?
Umm... The states mostly have not been interested in an ACA type solution. However, Massachusetts shows that it can be done, for better or worse, at the state level. The fact there was not the political will to do so in virtually any state is instructive.
No, the voters forced it on them -- you know, a democracy where people elect their representatives. The voters had just spoken and the drafters of the law were about to be forced to submit to the will of the voters (by losing their super majority) so they just crammed shit in hoping to fix it later.
I don't see how interpreting a law as written rather than speculating what the legislative branch might have meant and substituting that belief for the text requires throwing out the Constitution.
No one was asking them to ignore "99% of the text" or to toss the law out. They simply were asking for a few words to be interpreted correctly
The majority failed miserably and created a precedence that many defending their overreach will regret if recent revelations about Hillary Clinton's emails sink her in the general election. The next President is likely to appoint at least one justice that replaces one of the 'left leaning' block (Ginsburg comes to mind) and the court will have a right leaning majority which may use this new found power to interpret all sorts of laws rather than showing judical deference to the legislative branch and letting them fix them.
pretty much -- wikipedia has a decent article on the concept.
You should read the majority opinion -- at which time you will discover you couldn't be more wrong.
This decision decided that the traditional Chevron analysis wasn't applicable here and and instead invoked a less well developed legal theory and therefore didn't rely on the IRS's interpretation at all. They explicitly formed their own interpretation.
When analyzing an agency’s interpretation of a statute, we often apply the two-step framework announced in Chevron, 467 U. S. 837. Under that framework, we ask whether the statute is ambiguous and, if so, whether the agency’s interpretation is reasonable. Id., at 842–843. This approach “is premised on the theory that a statute’s ambiguity constitutes an implicit delegation from Congress to the agency to fill in the statutory gaps.” FDA v. Brown & Williamson Tobacco Corp., 529 U. S. 120, 159 (2000). “In extraordinary cases, however, there may be reason to hesitate before concluding that Congress has intended such an implicit delegation.” Ibid.
This is one of those cases. [...]
You can make the claim - the courts can rule against you. In doing so, they are doing elementary interpretation of the law.
Although contract law is not the question here, it is interesting that ambiguities in a contract are generally interpreted in a fashion most favorable to the NON-drafting party. In this case, the drafting party was, of course, those who passed the law (Democrats in Congress and the Administration).
It's not nearly as cut and dry as you suggest.
Which is exactly why the Federal Courts should leave it up to Congress to "fix" the plain text of the law if it was incorrect. This is not merely a scrivener's error that mis-numbered sections but the intended section numbering is obvious and a case where the courts can clearly determine the intended text.
But, it is not the court's job to substitute their stupidity for the stupidity of Congress -- Congress has the latitude to demonstrate their stupidity (as they did in so many ways with the PPACA) and the sole latitude to correct their own stupidity except in response to Constitutional challenges where the Federal Courts have that latitude. This was a statutory interpretation case, not a Constitutional questions.
"The right of the people to keep and bear Arms, for any reason whatsoever, shall not be infringed".
FTFY
E = MC ** 2 +- 3db
