Everyone has known this from the beginning. It was not an oversight — lawmakers did not mind being seen as generous with tax credits for low-income Americans, but they did not want to be seen as money funnels for corporate insurance titans. That is why the Obama administration quietly made annual appropriation requests to Congress when Obamacare was first implemented. And it is why Congress has refused to appropriate the funds.

President Obama understood that without reimbursement, the insurance companies would flee the exchanges or raise prices prohibitively. His signature legacy monument would be threatened. To prevent that, he violated the law. In 2014, his administration unilaterally began making non-appropriated cost-sharing payments to insurance companies. Those payments have continued, even through the first nine months of the Trump administration.

These payments are blatantly illegal. The federal district court in Washington so ruled last year. For what it’s worth, I believe Judge Rosemary Collyer was wrong to grant the House of Representatives standing to sue the Obama administration. The Constitution gives Congress its own powerful tools to confront presidential lawlessness; the Article I branch does not need the Article III branch to do its heavy lifting. That said, Judge Collyer’s decision on the merits is unassailable.