Megyn Kelly gave quite the dramatic recounting of the ObamaCare case before the Supreme Court – from one side only. Then she acted out some gratuitous smears of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. Bill O’Reilly was on hand to help.
Kelly ostensibly visited The O’Reilly Factor last night to discuss King v. Burwell, the case that could destroy ObamaCare. It’s nearly impossible to describe the dramatic flourishes, gestures and voices Kelly used, but you can get a taste:
KELLY: The truth is that when they set up ObamaCare, the feds… believed every state was going to set up its own exchange because that’s how you get the subsidies. …They wanted to make the states do it. …What they didn’t anticipate was that mostly these red states were going to say, "You know what? Screw your subsidies!" …And so they didn’t set it up. So then the feds said, "Oh, crap! …We’d better do something to backstop this!" and hence HealthCare.gov was born. So the feds said, "Let’s plug all these holes, plug all these holes!" (Kelly gestured furiously, like someone playing whack-a-mole.)… Everybody (who doesn’t have a state exchange) gets to deal with the beautiful, wonderful, smoothly operating HeathCare.gov.
She suggested the government’s position was dishonest and illegitimate by describing it as follows: “The law doesn’t mean how we wrote it. What you read there, that’s not how we meant it at all.”
I won’t go into all the complicated details but there’s another side to the story, to say the least. Huffington Post does a great job of outlining it. Writer Jonathan Cohn notes that the opposition’s case is “based on a theory of legislative history that is, at best, selective, and at worst, deliberately misleading.”
It’s striking that “straight news anchor” Kelly left out that side in her dramatic rendering.
Maybe that was because Kelly was too busy thinking of ways to work in smears of Ruth Bader Ginsburg. After noting that Justice Anthony Kennedy had been “very squishy… Squeeze my little Pillsbury (Doughboy)” (accompanied by a squeaky voice and more hand motions) during oral arguments, O’Reilly asked Kelly if that’s how she covered the Supreme Court when it was her beat. That’s when Kelly started taking gratuitous swipes at RBG:
KELLY: You know what I did when I was covering the court? Ruth: Wake up! (Kelly giggled)
O’REILLY: Oh, you woke her up! I thought you were going to say you gave her some wine!
KELLY: I’m tellin’ ya, every time, she sleeps on the bench. Somebody’s got to do something about it. …I don’t feel sorry for her. I feel sorry for Alito, who sits next to her and clearly is like, “Oh, my God. She’s asleep again. Wake up!” (Kelly made a jabbing motion with her elbow.)
O’Reilly: He can’t hear because of the snoring.
Kelly giggled.
It made big news that Bader Ginsburg fell asleep during President Obama’s recent State of the Union. But other than a case in 2006, I could not find any reporting of her doing that on the bench.
But this is what passes for a “straight news anchor” in a "no spin zone" on Fox. The same network where host O'Reilly's “I was in El Salvador and I saw nuns get shot in the back of the head” means “I saw the video.”
Watch Kelly’s dramatic re-enactments below, from last night's The O'Reilly Factor.
Plus if you’re on the biggest Liar on televisions show, it might be disrespectful to him to tell the truth! She’s done it before and gotten chastised.
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In other words, just like virtually EVERY piece of legislation that GOPers write and pass across this country.
Of course, FoxNoise doesn’t care about THOSE laws. It’s only when Dems pass laws that allegedly do what Kelly was saying that it’s a problem.
