Leave it to the Supreme Court to take a bad situation and make it worse. To my credit, during the last days before the ACA ruling from the Supremes I told my family that they would find some convoluted way to uphold it. I just didn’t know how convoluted.
It is personally disturbing to me as an attorney that Chief Justice Roberts would actually rewrite the law to call what was intended to be a mandate with a penalty a “tax,” especially when outside of court arguments, the President and his cabal in Congress made it a point to say it was NOT a tax. Oftentimes the court looks to the history of a piece of legislation to interpret it or to decide if it is constitutional, but that isn’t even in the realm of possibility here. The history shows it was drafted this way to avoid calling it a tax by an ideologically driven president and congress. No…Justice Roberts simply rewrote the legislation.
There are those who said he did it to show the court was nonpolitical. He was afraid of a 5-4 ruling would injure the reputation of the court. Since when? I can give you any number of decisions that were 5-4 to the liberal side and nobody from the liberal side complained about those. Justice Roberts said it was not the court’s job to decide on the merits of a law. He was right. Is it constitutional or not? That’s all the court had to decide. That is there job. Instead, from a court that has continually upheld abortion rights (under the nonexistent right of privacy in the Constitution), we now have a piece of bad legislation justified by bad law. Given that the law is already considered to be illegitimate, look for trouble in the country and system of health care sprining up outside the law for those who can afford it.
It’s clear to me that Justice Roberts was motivated by nothing but politics. When a decision is so convoluted it defies explanation, there is always a singular explanation. He was for the law, and he found a way to vote for what he wanted. Perhaps it is because he is an epileptic and knows that if he were a private citizen, he would be unable to buy health insurance. That makes sense, and it would have been better if that was the motivation he say it outright rather than disgrace the court, the legal profession, and himself with this type of ruling…a ruling that rewrote the words of the law as well as the intentions of those that passed it.
That being said, maybe he stumbled across the truth. Maybe he decided to call it what we all know it is. It is a tax. You either buy health insurance, or you will be taxed. In his twisted decision, Justice Roberts actually stated the limitations of the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, and pretty much said that the slight of hand of the Obama and his then Democratic/Progressive Congress did not work. You can have your law…but I will call it what it is. Now go into the political arena and defend it. On the other hand, the goverment is now clear to use tax law to coerce behavior changes. Get ready for penalty taxes on everything from not eating vegetables to drinking too much lemonade. It's coming folks.
The Wall Street Journal analyzed the tax provisions of Affordable Care Act, and they are anything but affordable. Most of them won’t hit until 2015. These include both direct and indirect taxes on over the counter medication, a tax on medical devices, a tax on bio-fuels (you know…what were are supposed to use instead of oil), and excise taxes on policies that cover more than the government says they can cover (what?). All in all, there are over 20 over taxes and elimination of tax deductions in the system established under the act…and most of them will be borne by people making UNDER $125,000.00/year, per the Wall Street Journal analysis. The middle class, once again, will be nickel and dimed to death under a bureaucratic nightmare….enforced by the Internal Revenue Service.
That’s right, it will be enforced by tens of thousands of new IRS agents that are being hired right now. And it will all fall down on you…unless you are one of Obama’s exempted cronies.
IRS enforcement? Maybe Justice Roberts was right afterall.
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