Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) was one of the greatest impediments to the passage of the Affordable Care Act back in 2009 and 2010, holding out as part of then-Finance Chairman Max Baucus's bipartisan "gang" of senators, informally convened to work out a reform plan. Grassley did his best at the time to derail negotiations, and in that role was very well aware of what was going into the legislation. And that includes
tax subsidies for everyone whose income qualified, according to a journalist who interviewed him about the
King v. Burwell challenge to the law that the Supreme Court will hear this spring.
Grassley's views were first reported by Steven Brill, the author of a recent book on the Affordable Care Act, during an appearance last week on MSNBC. Brill was discussing King v. Burwell, a lawsuit that seeks to cut off tax subsidies that help millions of Americans pay for health insurance in states that opted to have the federal government set up their health exchange rather than doing it themselves. According to Brill, when he asked Grassley about King, the senator initially "didn't even know what the suit was about."
Once Brill explained the suit to Grassley, the senator responded "oh, that's ridiculous. We obviously meant that the subsidies would go to the federal exchange and not just the state exchange," according to Brill.
Nor was Grassley alone in this view. Rather, Brill says that when the suit was filed, he asked "all the Republican staffers" who worked on the bill about this suit, and "they laughed at it."
As has everyone who followed the development of the law and pretty much every analyst. The only people who seem to find the challenge not ridiculous are the
activist Republican judges on the Fourth Circuit and the four U.S. Supreme Court justices who decided they wanted to hear this case. Them and the Republican lawmakers who have been
busily repositioning themselves on the issue since the court decided to take the case.
But this reporting on Grassley makes it just about as clear as anything could that Congress intentionally left out millions of people from affordable health insurance. Grassley was as close as any Republican lawmaker could be to the drafting of this bill. As he says, the case that plaintiffs are trying to make is ridiculous.