No matter how many impenetrable pages of verbiage were contained in the original law, it’s all equivocal and meaningless and can be endlessly reinterpreted by executive bureaucrats, so long as they believe they are working toward the aspiration named in the law’s title: “affordable care.”

That, ladies and gentlemen, is how we legislate now. What used to be a “law” is now just an open-ended grant of power coupled with a vague aspiration. Nothing in between, none of the actual concrete provisions of the law, has any meaning or makes any difference.

If you understand that context and that mentality, then you can see why ObamaCare’s defenders were so confident—and in many cases remain confident—that they get to skate on following the actual letter of the law. They believe no one will hold them to it, not the courts, not the press, not the public, because that’s the system they’re already living in.