Scalia leads scathing dissent on ObamaCare ruling, dubs law 'SCOTUScare'

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and his conservative colleagues may have been overruled in Thursday's decision upholding ObamaCare subsidies, but they didn't go down without a fight. 

The firebrand conservative justice delivered one of the most scathing and linguistically creative dissents in recent memory. In a 21-page rebuttal, Scalia and two other justices tore into the Affordable Care Act and the court's handling of it over the years -- effectively accusing their colleagues of twisting the law for the sake of preserving President Obama's signature policy. 

“Today’s interpretation is not merely unnatural; it is unheard of,” Scalia wrote, joined by Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito.

The case itself centered on language in the original law that technically limited subsidies to people buying insurance in exchanges set up by the states. Opponents said this made subsidies through the federal exchange invalid. 

“You would think the answer would be obvious -- so obvious there would hardly be a need for the Supreme Court to hear a case about it,” Scalia wrote.

The majority, though, upheld subsidies everywhere, arguing that is what Congress intended. 

Scalia in his dissent scolded his colleagues' handling of Affordable Care Act challenges, writing, “We should just start calling this law SCOTUScare,” referring to the several times the high court has ruled on controversial parts of ObamaCare. 

At one point, he panned the majority's reasoning as "pure applesauce." 

Scalia essentially made two major points: he accused the court of playing favorites by letting politics get in the way, and claimed the majority’s opinion contained “somersaults of statutory interpretation.”

The conservative justice attacked the logic behind the ruling as “interpretive jiggery-pokery” and said the result shows "words no longer have meaning." 

He wrote: “The Court forgets that ours is a government of laws and not of men. That means we are governed by the terms of our laws, not by the unenacted will of our lawmakers.”

Drilling down to the language of the case itself, he wrote: “The court holds that when the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act says ‘Exchange established by the State’ it means ‘Exchange established by the State or the Federal Government,’ That is of course quite absurd, and the court’s 21 pages of explanation make it no less so.”

He noted the other justices have stepped in twice now to block what he considered worthy challenges to the law, including the 2012 case challenging the individual mandate. Scalia suggested the court is now in a position of protecting the law, writing: "Under all the usual rules of interpretation, in short, the Government should lose this case. But normal rules of interpretation seem always to yield to the overriding principle of the present Court: The Affordable Care Act must be saved."

The Thursday decision was 6-3.

Chief Justice John Roberts delivered the majority opinion. He said that while the law’s wording was problematic, Congress’ intent was clear. 

"Congress passed the Affordable Care Act to improve health insurance markets, not to destroy them. If at all possible, we must interpret the Act in a way that is consistent with the former, and avoids the latter," he wrote. "Those credits are necessary for the Federal Exchanges to function like their State Exchange counterparts, and to avoid the type of calamitous result that Congress plainly meant to avoid."

Justices Anthony Kennedy, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Stephen Breyer ruled in favor of the subsidies.