Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 35

Busted With An Eggcorn, Ctd

Another day, another batch of eggcorns:

When my daughter was four, I asked her to go get me a beer (as it happens, a Budweiser) from the refrigerator. She was happy to make her dad happy and when she returned she said, “Here’s your buzzwater, Dad.”

Another tosses in a mondegreen:

For years, my favorite beer advertisement on the radio was a heavy metal tune with lyrics that went “AMSTEL LIIIIIIGHT, Enter night! Off to never never land!” I was too young to drink beer, and evidently too sheltered to have heard of Metallica.

From a reader with a Mozambique-born wife:

Her favorite tea is Early Grey.

Many more eggcorns below:

In my first real journalism job, my first big assignment was a feature on the head of an investment fund. He’s a very smart guy surrounded by a very smart team. I interviewed a partner in the firm for some background and, in my draft, quoted the partner using the phrase “a sort of Damocles.”

Fortunately, my editor asked me if that’s what he actually said. It was, I insisted. I went back and listened to the recording of our conversation multiple times, and that’s what I heard him say. Then I thought, “I don’t actually know what a ‘Damocles’ is.” So I did a little research and learned about Cicero and the Sword of Damocles and figured out quickly that I had a long way to go if I wanted to be any good at my job.

Another:

One of our ER psychiatrists referred in a note yesterday to the “Bloods and Crypts.”

Another:

I grew up in a small town, the kind where the newspaper would report on anything and everything that was happening if it was even mildly interesting. Sometime around my senior year of high school, the newspaper editor/reporter retired and was replaced by someone much younger. One of the first stories that the new editor ran was a story about the new tow truck that one of the two service stations in town had purchased. The new tow truck had a 15,000 pound winch on the back of it. Unfortunately, the newspaper article instead stated that the truck had a 15,000 pound wench in the back.

It’s unclear whether this ultimately helped or hurt the tow truck owner’s business.

Heh. Another:

When I was student-teaching, I taught To Kill a Mockingbird to a 10th grade class, and somehow we got onto the subject of ghosts (that was 20 years ago, but most likely we were referencing Atticus Finch’s remark that “there were other ways of making people into ghosts”). A female student then made a comment and used the idiom “the ghost is clear.” Everyone looked at her, puzzled. “You mean, the coast is clear,” I said. “No,” she responded, “that’s not the saying – ghosts are clear, aren’t they?”

Dina would appreciate this one:

When my son was four, we took a month-long camping trip following the Lewis and Clark Trail from our home in North Dakota to the Pacific Ocean. At one point we told my son that at the end of the trip we were going to Seattle. He got this really puzzled look on his face, and asked, “Who’s Attle, and why are we going to see her?”

Another of sorts:

​I was holding back on sending this because it’s more related to an accent than an actual “eggcorn”, but somebody in the thread brought up the Boston accent and I couldn’t resist. In graduate school I worked in the produce department of the Cambridge, Massachusetts Bread & Circus Market (eventually purchased by Whole Foods). I was relatively new and sometimes overwhelmed at the bizarre array of produce that was for sale.

One day a call comes in and I take the phone. Caller: “Do you carry staff root?”

Me (after checking the display): “No, sir. We have celery root, burdock root, taro root and ginger root. We don’t have any staff root.”

Caller: “No, no, no. Fruit shaped like a sta!”

He was, of course, a Bostonian looking for ‘star fruit’.​

One more:

I’m always sorry I didn’t save this clipping from our local newspaper … but the cut line under a picture of local school children dancing in a circle holding ribbons tied to a pole said: “Children Demonstrating the Maple Dance.” Makes me laugh to think of the circumstances of the likely over-the-phone interview between a young journalist and a grade school teacher, “Yeah, can you send me photo of the kid’s dancing? What’s it called again?”

Lovely thread. It probably should be recategorized into Mental Health Breaks.

Nous Sommes Charlie, But Do We Really Want To Be?

Don’t tell me Charlie Hebdo wasn’t racist because it attacks all religions… Then what is this? pic.twitter.com/0wPCAjcPrd

— #InCarloWeTrust ⭐️ (@UnbelievaBALE) January 8, 2015

Radical proposition: one can despise violence against #CharlieHebdo w/o signing off on their racist bullshit.

— Sean Lee (@humanprovince) January 7, 2015

Yglesias, for one, is dismayed that yesterday’s attack made martyrs of cartoonists whose work he found distasteful in the extreme:

Viewed in a vacuum, the Charlie Hebdo cartoons (or the Danish ones that preceded it) are hardly worthy of a stirring defense. They offer few ideas of value, contribute little to any important debates, and the world would likely have been a better place had everyone just been more polite in the first place.

But in the context of a world where publishers of cartoons mocking Mohammed have been threatened, harassed, and even killed, things look different. Images that were once not much more than shock for its own sake now stand for something — for the legal right to blaspheme and to give offense. Unforgivable acts of slaughter imbue merely rude acts of publication with a glittering nobility.

One of Dreher’s readers makes a similar point:

I am a francophone European, and I sometimes read Charlie Hebdo. I am shocked by these murders and I hope the assassins will be caught and will pay dearly for their crimes. This being said, je ne “suis” pas Charlie et je ne l’ai jamais été: I am not Charlie and I never was.

I’ve always thought that Charlie’s brand of “humour” was despicable and part of the problem, not a solution. I’m not going to change my mind about this because of the murders. The people who died have become martyrs of the freedom of expression, but they were hardly the best defenders of the freedom of expression. First because the freedom to express your opinions does not imply that these opinions are correct – and Charlie was a far left, violently anti-religious rag. It is not because you are free to be vulgar, unfair and insulting that all these things are good. Moreover Charlie was not very good when the freedom of expression of its adversaries was at stake: look at the “Dieudonné” affair for instance.

Dieudonné M’bala M’bala is a controversial French comedian and political activist who’s been convicted many times of antisemitism. Diana Johnstone is on the same page as Dreher’s reader when it comes to Charlie Hebdo‘s spotty record on free speech:

In 2002, Philippe Val, who was editor in chief at the time, denounced Noam Chomsky for anti-Americanism and excessive criticism of Israel and of mainstream media. In 2008, another of Charlie Hebdo’s famous cartoonists, Siné, wrote a short note citing a news item that President Sarkozy’s son Jean was going to convert to Judaism to marry the heiress of a prosperous appliance chain. Siné added the comment, “He’ll go far, this lad.” For that, Siné was fired by Philippe Val on grounds of “anti-Semitism”. Siné promptly founded a rival paper which stole a number of Charlie Hebdo readers, revolted by CH’s double standards. In short, Charlie Hebdo was an extreme example of what is wrong with the “politically correct” line of the current French left.

Indeed, many Muslims on social media are wondering why free speech seems a bit freer than usual when Islam is the target. One such Muslim is a Jordanian friend of Dish editor Jonah Shepp, who didn’t want to reveal her name:

Meanwhile, responding to calls for other publications to reprint Charlie’s most controversial work in solidarity, Arthur Goldhammer cautions against sacralizing artists and journalists who saw profaning the sacred as their life’s work:

Reproducing the imagery created by the murdered artists tends to sacralize them as embodiments of some abstract ideal of free speech. But many of the publications that today honor the dead as martyrs would yesterday have rejected their work as tasteless and obscene, as indeed it often was. The whole point of Charlie’s satire was to be tasteless and obscene, to respect no proprieties, to make its point by being untameable and incorrigible and therefore unpublishable anywhere else. The speech it exemplified was not free to express itself anywhere but in its pages. Its spirit was insurrectionist and anti-idealist, and its creators would be dumbfounded to find themselves memorialized as exemplars of a freedom that they always insisted was perpetually in danger and in need of a defense that only offensiveness could provide.

El Greco And God

Eve Tushnet recently visited an exhibition of El Greco’s paintings at the National Gallery of Art. She especially notices the 16th century painter’s striking religious vision, in which “tenderness, penitence, and estrangement comprise the human condition”:

The earliest work here is Christ Cleansing the Temple (ca. 1570). The wall caption notes that this was a popular subject for Roman Catholic painters during the Counter-Reformation. To Catholic artists, the church bore responsibility for the reaction its ministers’ sins and distortions had provoked, and the artists didn’t shy away from comparing their own church to the money-grubbing, Pharisaical religion confronted by Jesus. El Greco’s version of this scene is derivative and somewhat confused, but hints of his sensibility emerge: that characteristic blue-and-claret color scheme in Christ’s robes, the unearthly glow of the flesh.

Saint Francis Receiving the Stigmata [seen above] is surprisingly restrained. It’s another relatively early piece, from 1585-90, and although it’s a dramatic image, in which the saint is enraptured by his vision of the cross, there’s a quiet solitude to this painting. It doesn’t feel the need to shout. The tones are soft blacks and grays. The stigmata themselves are small: A dark red dot is visible on the big vein on the back of Francis’s left hand, as if an IV needle had been inserted there by a well-trained nurse. El Greco’s painting, in which flesh reveals that the crucifixion underlies all everyday experience, is not tormented. The saint’s expression speaks more of acceptance than agony or ecstasy. The cross itself is sketchy, blurred, in a frame of deep, black, rolling clouds. El Greco’s saints often have this gentleness to them.

Click here for a larger version of that painting, and go here for a detailed look at Christ Cleansing the Temple.

Taking A Stand On The Can, Ctd

Your toilet humor continues:

I gotta say my all-time favorite piece of bathroom graffiti is “All in all you’re just another prick in the stall.”

Another reader:

Personal fave: DYSLEXICS UNTIE!

Another:

From my college dorm circa 1970: “Free the Jackson five!”

Many more after the jump:

This poem is from my high school lavatory:

Here you sit in silent vapor;

The person before you used all the paper.

The bell has rung, you must not linger.

I feel for you; You must use your finger.

Another:

Here’s a personal favorite, in the bathroom at The Chapter House in College Town right outside Cornell: “Don’t drop acid. Just take it pass/fail.”

Another:

This was actually a small sign that we saw in some random pub somewhere in England, quite a while ago: “If you feel like the bottom is falling out of your world, drink Real Ale and you’ll feel like the world is falling out of your bottom.”

Another:

From the men’s’ bathroom at the University of Texas Business school, in 1981: “Save the whales … collect the whole set!”

Another:

On a condom dispenser in Cambridge, MA about ten years ago: “Insert baby for refund.”

Another:

Posted in a latrine at the VFW in in Wisconsin over the urinal: “Bucks with short horns stand close. The next Brave might be barefoot.”

One more for now:

Someone wrote something filthy along the lines of “I’m going to fuck your mother so hard your Dad walks funny”, which itself wasn’t so funny, except someone else came along later and in different pen and wrote underneath “- Tom Hanks”.

I wonder how long they stood there thinking of the best name to put, because I thought about it a while, and I think Tom Hanks really is the funniest name you could put there.

(Photos from the tumblr Notes from the Stall)

Did Terrorists Just Elect Le Pen?

James McAuley worries that the terrorist attack on Charlie Hebdo will empower France’s xenophobic far-right:

An additional dimension to this tragedy is that it plays directly into the hands of those public figures and politicians who would like to see France regress into an organic national community of blood ties, rather than of citizens. The Islamic extremists who executed the attack on Charlie Hebdo may have murdered journalists and artists, but surely their crime is also against other Muslims in France, who are now likely to be viewed as enemy aliens hostile to the essence of the Republic itself, regardless of their own beliefs. Michel Houellebecq, for instance, who often paints Muslims as a dangerous fifth column, might now perhaps be vindicated in the eyes of unreflective readers; and, in the words of one Lebanese blogger, today might very well be the day that Marine Le Pen became President of France. Le Pen, by the way, has compared the Muslim presence in France to the German occupation of the 1940s. After today, we can only hope that others will not start doing the same.

Le Pen was quick to express her own outrage, calling for France to bring back the death penalty and demagoguing against “Islamists who have declared war on France”. It’s a bit rich, given that Le Pen herself has been ridiculed in Charlie more than the Prophet Muhammad and once sued the magazine for its depiction of her (the cover on the right is one of its kinder representations of the far-right leader). And as Juan Cole astutely observed, inflaming anti-Muslim sentiment is a feature, not a bug, of Islamist terrorism. Kaj Leers reinforces that point today:

The danger now is that populists will hijack the debate and push the press into an anti-Islam frenzy. As this was being written, nationalist organizations and proponents of identity wars, such as supporters of the Pegida movement in Germany, were already using the Charlie Hebdo massacre as justification for their anti-Islam stance. This is precisely what religious fundamentalists seek:

to divide the world neatly into pro- and anti-Islam parts, leaving no distinction between mainstream Muslims and the fundamentalist fringe. In reality, no group has suffered more from violence by Islamist extremists over the past decades than Muslims themselves. At around the same time the hitmen exited Charlie Hebdo headquarters, where they killed 12 people, a bomb attack in Yemen killed 37 people and injured scores more. The last thing media should do now is give the terrorists the divided world they seek.

And it’s not just Le Pen; Bershidsky discovers that the attack is driving more Frenchmen into the arms of right-wing nationalist and anti-immigrant groups:

After the Paris attack, the number of people who “liked” the Facebook page of the German anti-immigrant group Pegida, which holds big and ever-growing weekly demonstrations in Dresden, jumped by about 7,500 to 120,500. … After the killings, Marine Le Pen, leader of the French far-right Front National, made a politically correct speech condemning Islamic fundamentalism, but one of her top lieutenants, Wallerand de Saint-Just, explained in an interview before she spoke that the problem was Islam, which “has a tendency to create fanatics more than any other religion,” and the French nationality of the suspected terrorists, which makes it impossible to deport them.

Wednesday’s act of terrorism is clearly encouraging anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant forces. They also don “Je suis Charlie” buttons, even though Charlie Hebdo was a leftist publication that made fun of them more often than it went after Muhammad.

But Kevin Lees sounds a more hopeful note, stressing that France hasn’t been instantly engulfed in anti-Muslim hysteria:

Instead of instinctively falling into some cartoon mould of right-wing xenophobia, most of what we saw from Paris, from France and much of the rest of the world were precisely those things about which France should be proudest — the freedoms and rights that necessarily follow from the liberté, égalité and fraternité that have formed the heart of French public life since the 1789 revolution. Far from embracing knee-jerk anti-Muslim sentiment, the world watched as France, implausibly, united behind Hollande, who actually looked like a president for perhaps the first time since his election. They rallied in city after city, from Paris to Marseille and beyond, not to excoriate a religion or five million French Muslims, but to defend freedom of expression and speech. No one’s burning down banlieues tonight in France.

But there been at least three attacks on mosques throughout the country so far, so Lees may be speaking prematurely here. Aurelien Mondon pushes back on Le Pen’s “clash of civilizations” posturing:

Le Pen told us that we should not be in “denial” but should name things for what they are. It is time to talk about Islam openly, she suggested. This is, at best, out of touch with contemporary French society. Currently, two of the best-sellers in France are filled with virulent anti-Islam rhetoric and countless vocal anti-Islam commentators are given air in the mainstream media on a daily basis. Islam is definitely not absent from the public debate.

What is absent from our mainstream media and politics is a careful analysis of what Islam is in France today. This would show once and for all that the Muslim “community” is not the monolith Le Pen would like us to believe. The terrorists who massacred 12 people on 7 January are apparently Muslim but so was the policeman who lost his life trying to stop them. Mustapha Ourrad, Charlie Hebdo’s copy-editor killed in the attack, was born in Algeria.

If yesterday’s events do catapult Le Pen into the presidency, Marian Tupy mulls over what that would mean:

While, as libertarians, we despise much of what Ms. Le Pen stands for, the two mainstream political parties in France, Mr. Sarkozy’s socialist center-right UPM and Mr. Hollande’s Socialist Party, have totally failed to address the legitimate concerns of the French citizens, chief among them the failure of multiculturalism and high unemployment. The country is ready to hand the reins of power to someone else.

Second, the euro will end its role as a global currency and remain a legal tender in something akin to Großdeutschland greater Germany, composed of Germany and her satellites, like the hapless Slovakia. … Third, on day two of a Le Pen presidency, border guards will return to the French frontiers. Of course, the end of the freedom of movement will be in full breach of all sorts of European treaties and conventions. (The British, by the way, would love to do the same, but cannot, because the British, being British, follow the rules. In contrast, the French, being French, will do what they have always done: follow their national interest.)

Blogger Down, Aisle 3

Just a note to apologize for my absence from the blog since a little after Christmas. I got the flu pretty bad (yes, like most HIVers, I got the shot) and haven’t been mobile now for ten days. I’m waiting on blood-work results to make sure nothing else is going on, and feel a little better today. So with any luck, I should be back blogging very soon. My deepest thanks, as always, to the Dish team for making my absence so worryingly hard to discern. And my deepest condolences to the people of Paris and France. Nous sommes Charlie aussi.

Poverty Crosses The Picket Fence

In need of more affordable housing, a growing number of poor people are being pushed out of cities and into the suburbs. But as Alena Samuels highlights, the rapid shift is proving complicated for both the newcomers and their adopted communities:

The problem speaks to a different kind of erosion of the American Dream, in which families strive to get to the much-vaunted suburbs, only to find out there’s nothing for them there. And as suburbs see more and more poverty, they become the same traps that impoverished, urban neighborhoods once were, where someone born there has few chances to improve his economic standing.

There are more tangible problems that arise when poverty grows in the suburbs. Often, government structures change more slowly than the population at large, and residents find themselves represented—and policed—by people who don’t understand their needs or concerns. The unrest in Ferguson, a St. Louis suburb, over the past year, reflects this conflict.

Suburbs also have less transit than urban areas, making it difficult for low-income residents to get to jobs or buy groceries. And social services have been slow to follow the poor to the suburbs, so many suburban poor find themselves isolated and without a safety net, hidden from those who might be able to help.

Capitulation Of The Day

A reader spots an “interesting bit of irony”:

The Washington Post article that criticizes Donohue’s ridiculous comments about Charlie Hebdo and the idea that offensive speech ought to be censored contains this cowardly disclaimer:

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article included images offensive to various religious groups that did not meet the Post’s standards, and should not have been published. They have been removed.

If any reader knows exactly what images they removed, let us know and we’ll post them here. Update:

The CBC has also refused to air the cartoons. Here’s the internal memorandum courtesy web journalist Jesse Brown:

Here are instructions from CBC Journalistic Standards & Practices director @DavidStuder1 to journos. #CharlieHebdo pic.twitter.com/96SGGs0IzY

— Jesse Brown (@JesseBrown) January 7, 2015

Slaughtered For Satire, Ctd

The Kouachi brothers are the main suspects in the #CharlieHebdo shooting. Here's what we know: http://t.co/hnhT8UULYl pic.twitter.com/eNCfDzQE6h

— CNN (@CNN) January 8, 2015

After their accomplice turned himself in, “reportedly after he saw his name circulating on social media,” the gunmen have been identified – but they remain at large. Their affiliation with terrorist organizations, if any, remains unclear:

On at least one jihadist website, the group calling itself the Islamic State, but more widely known as ISIS or Da’esh, appeared to claim responsibility for the shooting, which also injured 11 people, four of them seriously. But many jihadist groups have grievances against France because of its leadership in the war against them in Mali, its participation in the coalition fighting ISIS in Iraq, its laws imposing secularism in public offices and schools, and the ban on full-face veils, known as niqabs or burqas, on Muslim women.

The Kouachi brothers may be linked to Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the branch of the organization active in Yemen. Noah Feldman thinks through the implications:

If indeed the Paris attack is the work of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the franchise that includes Yemen, then its purpose is almost certainly to regain public attention from Islamic State and remind the world, Muslims and non-Muslims alike, that the old jihadi terrorist paradigm is still effective. France has no troops in the Middle East right now, so the attack needed another excuse. A satirical magazine that has made fun of the Prophet was just a convenient reason to get the al-Qaeda approach back in the headlines.

Of course, it’s possible that an Islamic State connection may still be found to this attack. If it is, that would be evidence that the group wanted capture the traditional al-Qaeda terrorism market for its own brand. That would be important and interesting, because it would mean Islamic State was trying to monopolize the global terrorism franchise.

Josh Rogin points to a recent ISIS video that urged followers to attack targets in France:

“If you are unable to come to Syria or Iraq, then pledge allegiance in your place — pledge allegiance in France,” a French jihadi identified as Abu Salman al-Faranci says in the video. “Operate within France. Terrorize them and do not allow them to sleep due to fear and horror.” He then offers more practical advice, implying that there were IS assets already in place to aid in such attacks. “There are weapons and cars available and targets ready to be hit,” he said. “Even poison is available, so poison the water and food of at least one of the enemies of Allah. Kill them and spit in their faces and run over them with your cars.”

But it’s not clear whether the Kouachi brothers were acting on specific orders from above or on their own, but Allahpundit finds it hard to believe that an attack this well-executed was the work of lone wolves:

It’s possible, I guess, that two French Muslim amateur terrorists fancied themselves members of the group in spirit, if not in fact, and wanted to do something sensational to earn their jihadi stripes. In that case, though, why didn’t they go to Syria to fight with ISIS as so many budding western mujahedeen do? And if they’re amateurs, they’re awfully precocious — taking time to learn the Hebdo publication schedule and keeping cool while executing staff members, all the while knowing that police could descend on the building at any moment, demonstrates a degree of poise you wouldn’t expect to find in a rookie. …

These two degenerates not only assassinated their targets individually, like ISIS does in lining up Shiites and noncompliant Sunnis to be shot, they had the balls and skills to leave the building and get away. When was the last time there was a major terror in the west that didn’t end up with the perpetrators splattered on the ground when it was over? And where exactly did these guys get AKs and a rocket launcher?

Juan Cole notes how the brothers were radicalized:

[I]n early 2003 at the age of 20, Sharif Kouashi and his brother Said started attending the al-Dawa Mosque in the Stalingrad quarter. They had showed up with long hair, smoking, and lots of bad habits. The mosque gave them a sense of purpose. Sharif told his later lawyer, “Before, I was a delinquent.”

One member of the congregation at the al-Dawa Mosque was Farid Benyettou. He was only a year older than Sharif, but was learned in Muslim texts, and taught informal classes at his apartment after prayers at the mosque. The boys began spending time with Benyettou. They stopped smoking, stopped getting high. At his apartment, Benyettou took them on the internet, and showed them images from Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq. Sharif said, “It was everything I saw on the television, the torture at Abu Ghraib prison, all that, which motivated me.” …

Without Bush’s invasion and occupation of Iraq, it is not at all clear that Sharif Kouachi would have gotten involved in fundamentalist vigilanteism. And if he hadn’t, he would not have gone on to be a point man in murdering out the staff of Charlie Hebdo along with two policemen.

Joshua Keating points out that “recent days have also seen a series of smaller attacks in France”:

On Dec. 20, French police shot dead a man who had shouted “Allahu Akbar” while stabbing three officers in a police station near the city of Tours. Just before Christmas, the country saw two attacks, one in Nantes and another in Dijon, involving cars hitting pedestrians, which fit a pattern of similar recent attacks around the world. In the car attacks, prosecutors specifically said the men were mentally unbalanced and that these were not instances of political or religious terrorism, though that definition seems a little hard to parse given that the Dijon driver was a recent convert to Islam who was reportedly upset over the treatment of Chechen children.

And today, there was another shooting in Paris, this time of a policewoman, which authorities believe may be linked to yesterday’s slaughter:

Officials described Thursday’s shooting as another terrorist attack. Paris Deputy Mayor Patrick Klugman said they were braced for a “wave” of terrorism. “It’s probably not the end,” he said. “We are ready to face it. We will fight.” Heavily armored commando units were deployed at the southern edge of Paris as a second major manhunt got underway on what was supposed to be an official day of mourning. Interior Minister Bernard Cazeneuve, who rushed out of an emergency cabinet meeting about the previous attack, arrived in the suburb of Malakoff to say that the gunman had escaped. Three armed killers are now at large.

Follow all Dish coverage of the terrorism in France here.

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One Way Obamacare Is Clearly Working

The uninsured rate keeps ticking down:

Kliff captions:

There are lots of ways to judge Obamacare is working: whether its helping lower health care costs, if its improving our access to doctors, and (perhaps the holy grail) if its making Americans health care. (The New York Times has an excellent package working through many of these issues). This graph shows that Obamacare is accomplishing at least one of its main goals: expanding health insurance coverage to millions of Americans.

Drum cheers:

The uninsurance rate has dropped the most among blacks, Hispanics, the young, and the poor. It’s dropped by only a small amount among the middle classes, since they’re mostly insured already by their employers. But even right smack in the middle, uninsurance rates have dropped by three percentage points. Obamacare just keeps on working, and it’s working for everyone.

Sargent notes that “the uninsured rate has fallen by 6.9 percentage points among those making less than $36,000″:

McConnell and other leaders of the incoming GOP Senate majority are openly looking to the Supreme Court to gut Obamacare subsidies as a means to accomplish what Republicans failed to do legislatively and politically.

Whether or not you think the consequences of a SCOTUS decision against the law should weigh on the Justices, the declining insurance rate — among lower income Americans in particular — should theoretically increase pressure on Republicans to think about how they will respond if such a decision does come down (such as a fix or an alternative). Indeed, even some diehard opponents of the law, and someGOP Senators, agree with this. Of course, it’s an open question as to whether this will actually happen in any meaningful sense: One alternative possibility is that Republicans will float the general idea that they’re interested in a fix solely in order to make the consequences of a SCOTUS decision against the law appear less dire.

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