Fortune: Chief Justice Will Save Obamacare, Again

Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts, “with his sensitivity to preserving the Court’s limited reservoir of credibility,” is unlikely to side with plaintiffs who seek to weaken the Affordable Care Act in King v. Burwell, Fortune Senior Editor Roger Parloff writes. The plaintiff’s arguments, “weaker—and cheekier—than first appeared,” Parloff says, count on the Court upholding a very literal interpretation of the Affordable Care Act, though there is little evidence that that interpretation was ever intended. Parloff points to a similar case, Yates v. United States, where the Court was asked to side with either a literal or contextual understanding of the law, as an example of when Roberts has been wiling to look at intent in interpreting regulations.