The admission by Obamacare architect
Jonathan Gruber that the law was purposely written to be vague could produce a ruling against federal exchanges by the Supreme Court in the spring, Judge Andrew Napolitano says.
"There's a principle of law that the Supreme Court is certainly familiar with, and that is when a statute is vague . . . it is interpreted with presumptions against the drafter," Napolitano said Monday on
Fox News Channel's "Your World with Neil Cavuto."
"This statute is back before the Supreme Court in the spring, and the issue has to do with vagueness in drafting," the Fox News legal analyst said. The high court will be deciding whether subsidies issued to people on federal healthcare exchanges are legal, because the law itself says states must set them up.
An earlier legal ruling said states could not be required to set up exchanges, forcing the federal government to do so for the states that did not. Most states opted not to set up their own exchanges.
The newly released video of Gruber, an MIT economist, shows him in a panel discussion saying that the drafters of the law purposely were vague on whether the individual mandate requiring people to buy health insurance was a tax. The Supreme Court's 2012 ruling that upheld Obamacare did so on the basis that the individual mandate was, indeed, a tax.
"Now we all know this was done intentionally, and guess what? The Supreme Court now knows this as well," Napolitano said. "If this phrase, this admission by this professor, gets before the Supreme Court, Obamacare loses."