"How Congress Works"

And Also:  The Mets going out and signing Colon for two years (after their first real acquisition of an OF) is a promising sign of being serious though given his age, I'm a bit wary.

What is relevant here is that the ACA is a very badly drafted statute. And it’s badly drafted for a simple reason that turns out to be important to understanding how the pending litigation should be resolved: Because Senator Ted Kennedy died in the middle of the legislative process and was replaced by Republican Scott Brown, the statute never went through the usual legislative process, including the usual legislative clean-up process.

I don't know how much -- vis-a-vis others -- the statute was "very badly drafted," but then don't find this useful discussion a "quick" post either.  The discussion covers something that Prof. Adler over at Volokh Conspiracy finds much less "incredibly weak" on the merits, which is nto suprisignly given his different leanings. To summarize:

The case is incredibly important—if the challengers win, consumers on more than half of the Obamacare health insurance exchanges will receive no tax subsidies to help cover the cost of insurance, an outcome that will devastate the operation of the Act. The case, in my view, is also incredibly weak. 

When Adler raised his concerns, some (including one person in particular) challenged his interpretation, adding that it is particularly important because it is being used in a way that will threaten the purpose of the statute.  I honestly cannot judge the merits of this bit of statutory interpretation, but as a general matter think what statutes demand in the sense that requires courts to strike down executive interpretations (e.g., so called Chevron deference issues) tend to be broad indeed. Laws tend to be able to be interpreted in various ways. This underlines the importance of whom administrates them. Unless fundamental rights like free speech are threatened, strict interpretation is bad policy.

So, putting aside my feelings that he sees things in a somewhat biased way, I really doubt Adler's case. I would not try to go man-to-man with a law professor on the statutory interpretation -- I'll leave it to this "quick" set of posts. I think "that the law should be enforced as written," which probably allows what is being done here.  Yes, unlike Adler et. al., I as a whole support the law (including as a realistic matter of possible alternatives), but that is only one factor into my view here.

Finally, one thing that annoyed me about Prof. Adler, who is less of a hack than a few people at his blog (see, e.g., Randy Barnett) is that he is aware of the reason the law was badly crafted in the way cited above. But, Adler did not take the additional honest step of noting the Republicans assisted this by refusing to let the draft bill go thru the filibuster to fix the kinks. I repeatedly noted this at the blog, the usual anti-Obamacare brigade taking this to be an attempt to let Democrats avoid blame.

Adler repeatedly sanctimoniously was concerned with the legislative messiness without being a real grown-up and challenging his side (he is a self-labelled "conservative") as to good government. If a law is going to pass, as this was, grown-ups allow it to be edited out (and if they want to get something -- not the whole thing tossed mind you -- fine).  Adler did this with the filibuster too. He says he is against the filibuster and other blockages like holds, but framed things as leaning against the Democrats. This includes noting filibusters started with Democrats blocking Estrada, ignoring how Republicans blocked people under Clinton.* Again, I use Adler as a stand-in for a wider concern.

Marty Lederman also started a series on the contraceptive mandate to follow-up on Eugene Volokh's "herculean effort." 

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* The Senate confirmed another D.C. Appeals judge, after a Republican led all-nighter deal. Anyway, Adler really annoyed me by his strict us of "filibuster," even as I pointed out that his fellow blogger, conservative libertarian David Bernstein used it to apply to functional filibusters -- that is, blocking nominations by a range of procedural tactics.