New York Times reporter John Harwood tweeted this morning: “worth restating: legal issues aside, chances that ACA authors intended it to work the way challengers say it must work are exactly zero.” It’s a common enough line of argument. But what does it prove?

The ACA authors “intended”—in the sense of hoped for—a lot of things. They intended for the CLASS Act to work, instead of essentially self-destructing and then having to be repealed. They intended for the law to become popular and for most states to participate fully. Most of all, though, they intended for the bill they wrote to be the law.

The bill they wrote appears at first and second glance to condition subsidies on a state’s establishment of an exchange. The typical congressman who voted for the bill surely had no conscious thought one way or the other about that conditionality. He never gave a moment’s thought to the questions, What if a bunch of states refuse to set up an exchange? Do people get subsidies on the federal exchange? So it’s a mistake to try to divine the legislators’ “intent” and decide the case accordingly. The relevant intent just isn’t there.