Supreme Court Rewrites ObamaCare, Allows Huge Tax Increases

To validate ObamaCare, the majority first had to uphold the constitutionality of the individual mandate. The individual mandate, which is the essential component of ObamaCare, requires virtually all Americans to purchase health insurance or pay annual penalties. The majority upheld the individual mandate by deciding it was a tax, not a regulatory penalty. Congress has broad authority under its taxing power.
The taxing power argument, however, was the government’s secondary argument to support the individual mandate. The government’s primary argument was that the individual mandate was justified by Congress’s power under the Commerce Clause, an argument that a combination of five other Justices had rejected. Thus, since the government’s main argument was rejected, the majority had to rely on the government’s secondary taxing power argument to uphold ObamaCare.
Until this point, the government’s taxing power argument was a loser and that is why it was surprising that the majority accepted it. By my count, nineteen other federal court judges considered the argument in the various ObamaCare cases. Eighteen of those judges rejected the tax argument.
The rejection of the Commerce Clause argument should have been the end of the case and the end of ObamaCare. But it was not. Rather, the majority rewrote the individual mandate to say that it was a tax, ignoring how Congress had drafted the law, to uphold all of ObamaCare.
The majority’s rewriting of the individual mandate as a tax did not escape the attention of the four dissenting Justices. Those four Justices had determined that the entire ObamaCare law should be invalidated. They correctly explained that “to say that the Individual Mandate merely imposes a tax is not to interpret the statute but to rewrite it. . . . [The majority] today decide[d] to save a statute Congress did not write.”
By upholding ObamaCare, the majority has allowed one of the biggest tax increases in American history to stand. ObamaCare includes twenty new or higher taxes on families and small businesses. This tax increase will take place despite the fact that President Obama pledged that he would not raise taxes on any American making less than $250,000, which is most Americans, and assured Americans that the individual mandate was not a tax.
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