Legal Issues
Behind Supreme Court's Obamacare Case, a Secretive Society's Hidden Hand
By
Mar 3, 2015 - 3:26:31 PM

(HealthNewsDigest.com) - For more than 30 years, the Federalist Society has worked behind the scenes to shape Supreme Court outcomes to a conservative agenda, ProPublica's Nina Martin writes today. In King v. Burwell -- a case opening tomorrowchallenging tax subsidies under the Affordable Care Act -- the society's influence could eliminate health insurance subsidies for millions of people.

Much has been said about what will happen if the court rules that low-income people who get insurance under the ACA's federal exchanges are not entitled to tax subsidies, Martin writes. But few reports have highlighted the behind-the-scenes role of the Federalist Society, whose ideas are at the intellectual heart of the King v. Burwell challenge. <script type="text/javascript" src="http://pixel.propublica.org/pixel.js" async="true"></script>

Martin explores the issue in a Q&A with  Amanda Hollis-Brusky, a Pomona College political scientist whose new book, "Ideas with Consequences: The Federalist Society and the Conservative Counterrevolution,"  traces the group's influence on the courts. Highlights from the conversation:

• Tracking a group with a secret membership: "I used speaker agendas from Federalist Society national student conferences and lawyer conferences from 1982 to 2012 to construct a database of everyone who's ever participated in one of these meetings: 1,190 individuals in all. These are the thought leaders - the Mick Jaggers of the movement. ... Then I tracked their movements: What Supreme Court cases were they participating in?"
• The 2012 Supreme Court decision upholding Obamacare:"It's true, Chief Justice Roberts found a way to salvage the ACA's individual mandate based on the power of Congress to impose taxes. That made many conservatives very unhappy. But the Federalist Society didn't just get half a loaf, it got 80 percent of the loaf."
• The society's philosophy on discrimination: "There's a trope you hear over and over in the Federalist Society network: the idea of the 'color-blind Constitution.' The implication is, to treat people equally, you treat them the same and it will all shake out in the end. The government shouldn't try to equalize resources or equalize opportunity - that's not its role."

The full Q&A is here: http://www.propublica.org/article/behind-supreme-courts-obamacare-case-a-secretive-societys-hidden-hand; please feel free to link to or republish it under our Creative Commons license. 
###

For advertising/promo please contact Mike McCurdy at: [email protected] or 877-634-9180