The Limits of Reading Law in the Affordable Care Act Cases

One of the most highly lauded legacies of Justice Scalia\u27s decades-long tenure on the Supreme Court was his leadership of a movement to tether statutory interpretation more closely to statutory text. His dissents in the Affordable Care Act cases- National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius and King v. Burwell- demonstrate both the nature and the limits of his success in that effort. These were two legal challenges, one constitutional and the other statutory, that threatened to bring down President Obama\u27s signature legislative achievement, the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act. Both times the Court swerved away from a direct collision. And both times Justice Scalia accused the Court majority- led by Chief Justice Roberts- of twisting the statutory text. Justice Scalia was right about the twistifications. But that does not mean he was right to condemn them both. Sometimes the governing law of interpretation calls on judges to adopt an interpretation other than the one that most straightforwardly follows from the application of standard interpretive conventions to statutory text