The Supreme Court's general approach to statutory interpretation is analytically incoherent. On the one hand, the Court has expressly endorsed "textualism": enforcing the plain meaning (i.e., ordinary usage) of a statute's words, and therefore refusing to consider non-textual evidence unless the language is unclear. On the other hand, the Court has implicitly applied "pragmatism"--reaching the best practical result after examining not only a statute's text but also Congress's intent (as revealed by legislative history), its overall purposes, precedent, and policy. The two cases upholding the Affordable Care Act (ACA) illustrate this practice of purporting to follow textualism, but then finding seemingly clear words to be ambiguous and consulting a variety of sources to resolve the manufactured ambiguity. First, in King, Justice Scalia made the unassailable textual argument that an ACA provision granting tax credits to those who purchase insurance on a Benefit Exchange established by "State" meant exactly what it said: one of America's fifty governments. A majority of Justices, however, asserted that "State" was unclear and could be read as also extending to the Federal Government. The Court adopted this broader interpretation based on its practical judgment that denying tax credits in the thirty-four States that had Federal Exchanges would cause millions of Americans to forego buying health insurance, which would frustrate the ACA's main purpose and potentially plunge insurance markets into chaos. This construction is defensible as an application of pragmatism, but not the textualist method the Court claimed to be employing. Second, National Federation concerned the ACA "penalty" for violating the individual mandate to purchase health insurance, which Congress had explicitly enacted under its Article I power to regulate interstate commerce--and not its taxing power. Four dissenting Justices applied textualism to conclude that Congress had imposed a "penalty," which has long had a single definition: "a monetary punishment for violating a regulatory law." Because the dissenters and Chief Justice Roberts agreed that Congress lacked power under the Commerce Clause to regulate inactivity (penalizing the failure to buy health insurance), the mandate should have been declared unconstitutional. Unexpectedly, however, Roberts joined his four liberal colleagues in maintaining that the term "penalty" was ambiguous and could possibly mean "tax"--a word that had always previously been defined as "an enforced contribution to support the government" and distinguished from a "penalty." This bizarre interpretation enabled the Court to reach its desired practical result of salvaging the mandate under Congress's constitutional power to tax. To compound the confusion, the Justices routinely invoke many specific "canons" of construction, which feature malleable standards that can easily be manipulated. For instance, in National Federation, the Court cited the canon that statutes should be read, where reasonable, to avoid constitutional issues in order to rationalize its tortured interpretation of "penalty"as "tax." King and National Federation are merely the most notable examples of a pervasive problem: unbridled discretion in construing statutes. Unfortunately, the Court has little practical incentive to change because (1) most statutes are of interest only to a small group, (2) Americans pay little attention to statutory interpretation, and (3) even unpopular individual rulings do not affect the public's overall high opinion of the Court. Nonetheless, respect for the rule of law and intellectual integrity should induce the Court to develop a more principled jurisprudence. The optimal solution would be for the Court to adopt and apply textualism as its basic interpretive approach, to clearly acknowledge when exceptional circumstances pragmatically persuade it to depart from that approach, and to deemphasize canons of construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]