U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito Jr. said Saturday that the last term was a “very bad term for textualism,” referring mainly to the 6-3 ruling that rescued the Affordable Care Act from an interpretation that might have wrecked it.
“Last term was a term in which the court followed what Humpty Dumpty famously said: ‘When I use a word … it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less,” Alito said in Dallas at a Federalist Society event, according to a write-up from law professor Josh Blackman. Alito was in the minority in the court’s June 25’s decision in King v. Burwell.
