This is what the plaintiff's case is looking like, more and more.
In what will come as a shock to pretty much no one, it turns out that the handful of Republican state officials who have filed briefs with the Supreme Court in support of the challenge to federal subsidies in
King v. Burwell are lying in those briefs. Or, if they're not lying, they've done a complete 180 from the understanding of the law they had before this case reached the Supreme Court. That's
coming from an analysis reported in the totally not political policy journal
Health Affairs. At issue in this case is whether Congress intended to withhold subsidies from people signing up on the federal health insurance exchange.
Between October 2012 and March 2013, with the support of the Commonwealth Fund, the Center on Health Insurance Reforms (CHIR) conducted a comprehensive review of publicly available information in 50 states pertaining to their decisions to operate either a state or federally run exchange.
We also conducted in-depth interviews with officials from twelve states. The findings were published in April 2013 and are available here. We found no evidence that states weighed the possibility that premium tax credits would not be available in federally run exchanges.
In fact, they write, they heard the opposite from state officials in their interviews—states weren't concerned that they would be shooting themselves in the foot by refusing to set up their exchanges, they hoped to overwhelm and cripple the federal exchange by piling on to it. One state official
told them that "They think that if states don’t participate, the Affordable Care Act will fail and they won't get blamed." If they were seeking to avoid blame, it's not too likely that they would have deliberately withheld financial assistance to people in their states by going on the federal exchange.
To accept these Republicans officials' version of events, you'd have to believe it was an eleventy-billion dimensional chess game on the part of 36 separate states joining the federal exchange. That even doesn't work because some of those states wanted the law to succeed. No, this new argument from a few Republican state officials isn't plausible. But it is completely in keeping with what Republicans are doing on this case: lying through their teeth.