Foreword—King v. Burwell Symposium: Comments on the Commentaries (and on Some Elephants in the Room)

As an introduction to the Symposium, this invited response essay reviews the pieces submitted for the Pepperdine Law Review symposium on the King v. Burwell case. The thrust of this essay’s response commentary is to praise the submitted essays for their excellence and insightfulness, but to suggest that the submitted essays nonetheless might benefit from focusing more on the role of the political mobilization that resulted in the King v. Burwell dispute. Ultimately, this essay suggests that what may have motivated the Supreme Court to develop and apply its new “deep economic and political significance” test in this this case may not have been anything inherent to the content or subject matter of the disputed provision itself. Rather, the motivation was likely a response to the political mobilization of epistemic communities around interpretations based on incompatible worldviews that occurred subsequent to the passage of the legislation being interpreted.