Supreme Court should interpret Obamacare as written

The U.S. Supreme Court recently announced that it would hear argument in what could be the most important challenge to Obamacare yet litigated in federal court. A ruling against the administration would effectively spell the end of Obamacare in 34 states. Already defenders of the law are saying that striking down the administrative rule in question would be brazenly "political," and that the court should defer to the president's (implausible) interpretation of the health care law. In fact, the reverse is true. It is blind deference to the president that would be political, and worse, harmful to the rule of law.

The suit, called King v. Burwell, challenges an Obama administration rule that attempts to force federal subsidies on states that have chosen not to set up Obamacare health exchanges. Missouri is one of them. But here's the thing: the famous Affordable Care Act mandates that requires individuals and businesses to purchase health care only applies in states where federal subsidies are available. If subsidies are not legally available in a given state, there are effectively no mandates.

Moreover, the law says that federal subsidies will not be available in states that decline to set up a health care exchange. And that's what this lawsuit is all about. Thirty-four states, including Missouri, decided not to set up Obamacare exchanges. But the Obama administration has issued an interpretive rule saying subsidies will be available -- and the mandates on individuals and businesses will apply -- anyway.

The Supreme Court was sufficiently concerned about the discrepancy between what the Affordable Care Act says and what the Obama administration has done to grant review even without a split in the lower federal courts. Sensing danger, supporters of the law are already warning the Justices not to interfere with the president's plans lest they involve the Court in politics.

The justices should ignore that advice. The question at the heart of this lawsuit is whether the president has appropriately interpreted a federal law, or instead rewritten it. Answering that question is not a political exercise; it's a legal one. Interpreting statutes is a discipline judges practice every day, and they have a broadly accepted, nonpartisan method for doing it. They look to the law's text and to the broader statutory context, then sometimes also to precedent and legislative history.

Those traditional, nonpartisan methods of statutory construal strongly suggest the administration has overstepped its bounds here. The key statutory language in the Affordable Care Act explicitly limits subsidies to exchanges established "by a state." The administration contends that if the federal government runs an exchange in a state, that exchange qualifies as a "state exchange." But other parts of the Affordable Care Act carefully distinguish between exchanges run by states and other entities and those run by the federal government.

The law's history doesn't help the administration either. Contrary to the administration's frequently repeated claims that no one ever thought at the time the statute was passed that subsidies would be unavailable on federally run exchanges, recent news reports reveal that one of the principal architects of the Affordable Care Act acknowledged as late as 2012 that subsidies were indeed available only on exchanges operated by states.

Which is why some supporters of the law now argue that the court should simply defer to the president's interpretation of the law, however implausible it may seem. The law is too important, they say, the ramifications too profound, to reject the administration's interpretive rule.

But to follow that advice would be to play politics. Whether a given law as written advances the president's political agenda or hinders it is utterly beside the point when it comes to statutory interpretation. Put another way, a law's fit with the president's agenda is not a legal question. It's a political one. And as such, it is no business of the courts. Instead, the courts' responsibility is to apply the law as drafted and adopted by both houses of Congress and signed by the executive.

Obamacare defenders are right about one thing: this is an unusually important lawsuit. The court was right to take the case. Now they should stick to their role and interpret the law as Congress wrote it.

Joshua D. Hawley is a former clerk to Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. He is the founder of Missouri Liberty Project and an associate professor of law at the University of Missouri-Columbia.