In today’s New York Post, I speculate that Chief Justice John Roberts may have wanted us to see the illogic in his fascinatingly sophistic opinion in the Obamacare case:
Like many people who read yesterday’s decision, I will go to my grave unable to reconcile the plain fact that on page 15 Chief Justice John Roberts says the bill’s mandate to buy health insurance isn’t a tax — only to say on page 35 that it is a tax.
In a beautiful turn of phrase, the four dissenting justices said Roberts’ contortion on this matter “carries verbal wizardry too far, deep into the forbidden land of the sophists.”
Roberts’ grotesque offense against elementary logic is so bald-faced, I’m almost tempted to believe he left it there on purpose, either out of perversity or as a not-so-hidden message that he had ulterior motives for upholding the constitutionality of ObamaCare.
i am 63. if what this country has become in my lifetime is a precursor to what it is to become in the future, please don't show me the fountain of youth 'cause i'll pass on that thank you very much. for the first time in my life (i fought proudly in vietnam), i am ashamed to be an american.
Terence Jeffrey expresses the same bafflement ("it is a tax; it is not a tax") and I wonder how Roberts could not see that he has set the American people up to always be vulnerable to many new taxes by unscrupulous elected people to raise taxes for just about anything and everything. Roberts is the new emperor who wears no clothes because us Americans, who don't know the ins and outs of the law, we do have gut feelings that this new opinion smells fishy and something is not right. The dissenting judges are sending us a message that any ordinary American can "get": this majority opinion is just plain wrong and we have been lied to by our president.
Yes, and the real tragedy is that Roberts has now created a new foundation of the Leviathan in the taxing power. The Wickard v. Filburn foundation had finally been proved to have a limit (and was always suspect). The he created a whole new bogus foundation with which to torture us for another 50 years. His name should go down in infamy.