Nicholas Bagley has an excellent summation of the standing/mootness question for the four King plaintiffs. There are a couple of lines in his post that I want to highlight:
Although King appears to lack standing, it’s hard to say for certain whether Hurst, Levy, or Luck do. One of them might well have standing, although I’m frankly not sure which one….Is the Court really untroubled by the very real possibility that the plaintiffs have used inaccurate or misleading declarations to manufacture a federal case? Or that the case may have become moot as to some of them? This isn’t your garden-variety suit; it’s precisely the sort of high-stakes ideological clash that—absent a plaintiff with a bona fide injury—standing doctrine is supposed to filter out.
Why is Professor Bagley surprised that the standing and mootness component of the plaintiff’s case is sloppy and rife with errors. It would have been surprising that everything on this score was clean, proper and straightforward.
The entire case has been built on deliberate misreading of the law, bullying of advocates that the evidence is clear that no one thought subsidies were contigent on states establishing exchanges, deliberate mistatements of what reporters wrote and then mansplaining to those reporters what they actually meant after the reporter responded, sadistic satisfaction, and a deliberate willingness to have the same plaintiff say multiple things in multiple cases.
Why should it be surprising that standing is a clusterfuck as well?