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Air Date: March 04, 2015
Host: Vic Eliason
Guest: Mat Staver
Mat Staver is the founder, president & general counsel of Liberty Counsel, an international, non-profit litigation, education and policy organization dedicated to advancing religious freedom, the sanctity of life and the family. Mat is the Dean at the Liberty School of Law.
Mat began by commenting on the recent speech by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu before a joint session of Congress. He described the dire situation in which Israel finds itself regarding Iran’s nuclear aspirations. In other words, this speech was not about his election and Mat believes Netanyahu would have come here with or without the election. He was cut out of deals, cut out of negotiations, he had top Israeli intelligence information leaked by our administration and he found out that President Obama was involved in secret negotiations with the Iranian regime.
Mat then commented on the ‘tug of war’ going on between the U.S. Supreme Court and the Alabama Supreme Court. Liberty Counsel filed a petition at the Alabama Supreme Court to stop the probate judges from issuing same-sex marriage licenses. You may recall that Chief Justice Roy Moore issued an administrative order saying that the probate judges must follow Alabama law stating that marriage is between a man and a woman. Many probate judges did just that but then there was another opinion issued and soon some probate judges began issuing same-sex marriage licenses. Liberty Counsel filed suit against approximately 5 of the probate judges and went straight to the Alabama Supreme Court. They issued a lengthy opinion that Mat feels is solid as it pertains to the rule of law, the intersection between state and federal courts and marriage. It ultimately says that probate judges must cease from issuing same-sex marriage licenses. As Mat proved to listeners, regardless of what homosexual activists might say or write, the federal judge who is at the core of this situation knows she doesn’t have the authority to force same-sex marriage on the state of Alabama.
Mat also covered the circumstances surrounding the case of King vs. Burwell. This deals with the federal subsidies aspect of the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). The original law never contemplated states opting out of the system. A state could opt out and not have a state exchange but if they did so they would not get federal Medicare/Medicaid funding. When the Supreme Court received the Obamacare case, Chief Justice John Roberts literally rewrote the statute saying that states can opt out and by doing so they don’t give up their federal funding for Medicare/Medicaid. The result? Some states opted out anyway while keeping their Medicare/Medicaid funding and they have no state run exchanges. So now if someone needs to purchase insurance, in more than half the states there are no exchanges. In response, the federal government created their own federal run exchanges.
So if you’re in a state that doesn’t have a state exchange, can you get the same federal subsidy? According to Mat, the plain reading of the law says no, that you have to be in a state that has a state run exchange. That’s the argument before the Supreme Court.
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