“Don’t Look At Us. We Didn’t Do it.”

You can accuse the co-ACA Troofer-in-Chief of many things, but having shame is not one of them:

“If they’re not looking at some kind of contingency plan, I think that’s irresponsible. It’s kind of like hostage-taking,” said Jonathan Adler, a law professor at Case Western Reserve University and one of the architects of the legal challenge.

I can’t even. The problem with the argument is that Adler and Cannon are both taking and shooting the metaphorical hostages, and they’re asking Obama to tell the public that everyone is fine while the hostage-takers look for a getaway car.

And what Adler is asking is for the Obama administration to lie to further his campaign to willfully misread the ACA to strip insurance from millions of people. There is no meaningful contingency plan the administration can put into action. They cannot force Republicans in Congress to pass anything (let alone anything that would make the problem better rather than worse.) They cannot make states establish exchanges. They cannot repeal basic economic facts. The fate of the newly uninsured will be mostly beyond their control, unless Adler thinks that the administration’s response should be “John Roberts has made his decision, now let him enforce it.”

If the troofers can eke out a bare Supreme Court majority for their argument, then the health insurance markets in a majority of states will thrown into chaos. This situation will not change in many of the states anytime soon, and the result will be plenty of unnecessary suffering and death. That’s not a threat; it’s a fact. Adler should own it, not join his political allies in pretending that there’s some magic fix Obama will pull out if his hat after it happens.