The Plain Text of ObamaCare. Subsidies via states only were part of the Democratic plan.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

The law’s Democratic drafters wanted the states to participate and assumed all of them eventually would, much as with Medicaid and many other familiar programs under cooperative federalism. Conditioning subsidies on state action was meant to give Governors and legislatures an irresistible incentive to contribute to ObamaCare’s implementation and lend political legitimacy. In return, their constituents were eligible for benefits.

There's more:

the Secretary of Health and Human Services was empowered to grant unlimited sums of money to states to establish exchanges. But the law appropriated not a penny for the federal exchanges, and HHS raided internal slush funds to build them. If there is no legal difference between the federal and state exchanges, why did HHS need this budget ruse?

The Administration also suggests no textual basis for the IRS rule. Instead, Solicitor General Donald Verrilli claims “established by the State” is a “term of art” that must be read in an ambiguous context and that the Administration’s reading is owed judicial deference. The SG is laboring to create confusion where none exists—but what is not ambiguous, he argues, is that Congress’s purpose was to create national health care and that overturning the subsidies would disrupt this policy result. Most liberals have dumped even this legal subtlety, dismissing King as a drafting error.

In fact, ObamaCare’s history shows Democrats made a deliberate choice. As they tried to assemble 60 votes in the Senate, holdouts like then Nebraska Senator Ben Nelson intensely desired state partners. Because the federal government couldn’t commandeer the sovereign states by mandating participation, the subsidy bait was Congress’s constitutional option to encourage buy-in.

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