A crucial insight on King vs Burwell

Here's a key exchange between Justice Scalia and Solicitor General Don Verrilli:

JUSTICE SCALIA: What about what about Congress? You really think Congress is just going to sit there while while all of these disastrous consequences ensue. I mean, how often have we come out with a decision such as the you know, the bankruptcy court decision? Congress adjusts, enacts a statute that
that takes care of the problem. It happens all the time. Why is that not going to happen here?

GENERAL VERRILLI: Well, this Congress, Your Honor, I- I-
(Laughter.)

GENERAL VERRILLI: You know, I mean, of course, theoretically of course, theoretically they could.

JUSTICE SCALIA: I-- I don't care what Congress you're talking about. If the consequences are as disastrous as you say, so many million people without without insurance and whatnot, yes, I think this Congress would act.

Verrilli offers the conventional wisdom-- that the current Republican-controlled Congress is hopelessly dysfunctional and that Republicans have been unable to agree on a fix for Obamacare--in part because there is no consensus on a substitute for Obamacare, and in part because their more radical elements will punish politicians who attempt to fix the program. Moreover, he assumes that it is vain to hope that there will be a bipartisan solution because Republicans and Democrats disagree so pointedly about Obamacare.

Scalia, however, sees things differently. He believes that when push comes to shove, Republicans will overcome their internal divisions and come up with a sensible solution that will preserve insurance coverage for millions while getting rid of the hated Obamacare. If you read the media that Scalia reads, you might well believe that this is the case.

But even if you don't agree with that view, and you don't regularly get your news from conservative media, you might well believe (or at least hope!) that Congress will respond in the face of a genuine disaster. Republicans will back down from their complete rejection of Obamacare and pass a technical fix.

But that assumes that the Republicans in Congress see the world the way that you do. Some of them may, but some of them may not. Your judgment of the likely consequences depends on other people's vision of reality.

Scalia's optimism about the consequences of holding for the petitioners is premised on the view that Congress is not really dysfunctional, and that this is an unfair portrait painted by a liberal media. People with a different view of the world will probably disagree-- Congress is broken. Or, at the very least, they have insufficient faith in the current political system to want to gamble that Congress will be able to avoid a disaster.

Competing visions of the world matter greatly in making arguments about consequences. And there many many ways that liberal and conservative elites can find ways to disagree about what is actually happening. Even if the Justices all agree on the consequences of denying subsidies in federal exchanges, they may still have very different views of the world when it comes to how the current political system works and whether Congress can be trusted to work things out. And that difference in their views of reality may be crucial to how the case comes out.