so judge my first question do you think we should take the president at his word
when he says his nominee will do the right thing and overturn the affordable care act
senator klobuchar um i can't really speak to what the president has said on twitter um he hasn't
said any of that to me and what i can tell you um as i have told your colleagues earlier today
is that no one has elicited from me any commitment in a case or even brought up a commitment in the
case i am 100 committed to judicial independence from political pressure so whatever people's you
know party platforms maybe or campaign promises may be the reason why judges have life tenure
is to insulate them from those pressures so i take my oath seriously to follow the law
and you know i i have not pre-committed nor would i pre-commit to decide a case any particular way
okay and i think this life temnier this idea that you have just for everyone out there a
job for life makes this even more important for us to consider where you might be and i know
you have not said how you would re rule on this case that's coming up right after the election
where the president had said it would be a big win if the supreme court strikes down the law
but you have directly criticized justice roberts in an article in my own state in
one of the minnesota law school journals it was in 2017 it was the same year you became a judge
and when roberts writes the opinion to uphold the affordable care act you said he quote pushed the
affordable care act beyond its plausible meaning to save the statute is that correct senator
klobuchar i just want to clarify is this the constitutional commentary publication that you and
i discussed yes it is but it's still a minnesota university minnesota lab yes okay i just wanted
to be sure because yeah i hadn't published in the minute i just again did you ask that question did
you say that that he pushed the affordable care act beyond its plausible meaning to save the
statute um one thing i want to clarify is you said that i criticized you know chief justice roberts
and i don't attack people just ideas so that was just designed to to make a comment about
his reasoning in that case which i've as i've said before is consistent with the way the majority
opinion characterized it as the less plausible reading of the statute okay so you didn't agree
with his reasoning in the case that upheld the affordable care act what i said and was this
king versus burwell or nfib versus sibelius that was nfib versus civilians i'll get to king versus
burwell in a second um what i said with respect to nfib versus sebelius is that the interpretation
that the majority adopted construing the mandate to be a tax rather than a penalty was not the
most natural reading of the statute it was still the reading that justice roberts got to now you
also criticized as you pointed out by bringing up king v burwell another case where the court
ruled in favor of the health law this was in a 2015 uh national public radio interview and you
acknowledge that the result of people being able to keep their subsidies under the affordable care
act uh was a would help millions of americans yet you praised the dissent by justice scalia saying
the dissent had quote the better of the legal argument is that correct i did say that yes okay
so then would you rule have ruled the same way and voted with justice scalia senator klobuchar
one of the uh plus sides or the upsides of being an academic is that you can speak for yourself
that a professor professes and can opine but it's very different than the judicial
decision-making process so it's difficult for me to say how i would have decided that case if
i had to go through the whole process of judicial decision making that i was describing this morning
now having been a judge for three years i can say i appreciate greatly the distinctions
between academic writing or academic speaking and judicial decision making such that a judge
might look at an academic and say easy for you to say because you're not on a multi-member court
you're not constrained by story decisis you don't have real parties in front of you
consulting with litigants consulting with your clerks it's just a different process