The Supreme Court decision last week on Obamacare raised legitimate concerns about the role of the court in its interpretation of congressional legislation. Chief Justice John Roberts writing for the majority seemed unconcerned about the fact that he was legislating from the bench. The next day in the same sex marriage case, in his dissent he argued that “judges have power to say what the law is, not what it should be.” One guest on my radio program suggested that perhaps the Thursday John Roberts should have lunch with the Friday John Roberts and try to figure out what he really believes.

This majority decision on the Affordable Care Act rested on their assertion that the phrase about the state exchanges was ambiguous. I don’t think that it was, but let’s assume that it was ambiguous. The natural thing to do would be to tell Congress to clarify the ambiguity. They did not. That is why Justice Scalia said that Obamacare should probably now be called SCOTUS-care (based on the acronym for the Supreme Court).

But if ambiguity is a justification for a new interpretation, why stop there? Many state and federal laws are ambiguous because they are poorly written. Am I free to give those laws my interpretation? You could even argue that the Ten Commandments could be seen an ambiguous. Do they merely apply to Moses and the children of Israel? Do they just apply to people living in the Old Testament?

We are living in a world where words are losing their fixed meaning. We hear about transgender and trans-racial. Society’s belief in absolutes is gone. So if a law is ambiguous, do we have a right to interpret it the way we want?

Obamacare was supposed to solve the problems with the four Ps: price, preexisting conditions, portability, and people (that is uninsured people). It is hard to see how it has solved any of these issues. Meanwhile, the Supreme Court once again propped it up with by declaring the expressed written law ambiguous so it could put its interpretation on it. It has become a legislative branch.