The Republic's No-Good, Horrible, Very Bad Day....and Chief Justice Roberts is a lying sack of....

In honor of the horrible, no good, crappy, dishonest, clusterf#ck of a SCOTUS opinion by that coward Roberts who stretched logic to absurd lengths to justify his capitulation of his duty, stretched it so thin that even I could tell that he contradicted himself within one paragraph, to justify REWRITING the law, and thus giving power to Congress to tax us for ANYTHING....



A RE-POST OF TWO VERY RELEVANT PIECES BY CONCRETEBOB


Its a Dessert Topping, Its a Floor Wax

Heritage Foundation Morning Bell

The New York Times confirmed Friday that in preparation for defending constitutionality of the Obamacare individual mandate in court, an Obama Justice Department legal brief argues that the penalty used to enforce the mandate is “a valid exercise” of Congress’s power to impose taxes. Mr. Obama’s own Justice Department further repudiates the President’s earlier statement by noting that the penalty is imposed and collected under the Internal Revenue Code, people must report it on their tax returns, and that the Congressional Budget Office estimates that it will cost Americans $4 billion a year. Yale Law School professor Jack Balkin told a meeting of progressive activists last month that President Obama “has not been honest with the American people about the nature of this bill. This bill is a tax.”

The fact that the Obama administration and their allies are now admitting the individual mandate is a tax betrays their very real fear that the Supreme Court could find Obamacare’s individual mandate unconstitutional. In the bill itself, Congress identified the Commerce Clause as the source of their authority to force all Americans to buy health insurance. But as our legal team has made imminently clear, the mandate does not purport to regulate or prohibit commerce of any kind. To the contrary, it purports to “regulate”—and penalize—inactivity. If the Supreme Court allows the Obamacare individual mandate to stand, then Congress could do anything it wanted. They could: require us to buy a new Chevy Impala each year to support the government-supported auto industry; require us to buy war bonds to pay for the Iraq and Afghan wars; or force us to eat our vegetables.

Its a Dessert Topping, Its a Floor Wax, Its A Fine, Its NOT a Tax

"Legal arguments for Obamacare's individual mandate fail the 'Alice in Wonderland' test and the duck test. In two court challenges to the law in the past 11 days and a court hearing today on a third, the Obama administration's legal position is fading faster than the Cheshire Cat.

'The provisions of the Health Care Reform Act at issue here, for the most part, have nothing to do with the assessment or collection of taxes,' Judge Steeh ruled.

This is so important that the federal district judge in Florida, in Thursday's preliminary ruling in the second case, spent 22 pages analyzing it. If the fine is a penalty rather than a tax, Congress' power is far less extensive.

Judge Roger Vinson noted Congress repeatedly called the fine a 'penalty,' explicitly changing its description from a 'tax' that earlier versions of the bill assessed by name. Citing Alice's admonition to Humpty Dumpty that words can't 'mean so many different things' as Humpty intended, Judge Vinson concluded, 'Congress should not be permitted to secure and cast politically difficult votes on controversial legislation by deliberately calling something one thing ... [only to] argue in court that Congress really meant something else entirely.'

Judge Vinson explained that no matter what Congress called it, the assessment was designed to act as a punishment, not a revenue measure. Hence, it's not a tax.

His 22-page analysis is an exposition of the logic that if something is called a duck, acts like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's a duck -- and the same goes for a penalty. The tax issue is vital because it's the Obama administration's fallback position if it loses on the first and biggest dispute, which is whether Congress has the power under the Commerce Clause not only to regulate commerce, but to force individuals to engage in specific commerce."

--The Washington Times