Affordable Healthcare Act upheld

[Vad]

Roberts claimed the mandate was under the authority of the Congress to lay and collect taxes, but the Constitution only mentions excise, impost, income, or duty taxes. The individual mandate is none of them since it only applies to people not doing as the law commands, which is probably why Roberts didn't call it any type, and neither is it going to be laid uniform (a Consitutional requirement).

On top of that, taxing is a method for collecting money for funding the national govt's activities but the ACA doesn't apply to any Enumerated Power, so at best what we have is a tax of questionable validity being arbitrarily applied to fund an unenumerated activity.

And I've been watching the left foam at the mouth since the oral arguments about how Roberts was some sort of right wing loon simply for questioning the administration's terrible logic behind their legal defense of the bill. The hysterics was funny for a while, but in the end all he did was marginally close the until-now unlimited expansion of the Commerce Clause and open a much bigger hole in the Tax Clause.

The only thing that seems right with this is that Roberts was telling Democrats that they have to stop lying about the mandate not being some sort of tax (but what kind? apparently nobody knows). The dissenting opinion was also full of interesting counter points, especially in that what Roberts did was change the defense's argument in order to get it to fit into a vague interpretation of the Tax Clause. It's not the Justice's role to tell the involved parties what case they should have made, but to judge the case that they did make.

I've read that Romney raised three million dollars the same day that the ruling came out, and the campaign donation window is now only hours away from closing. The SCOTUS ruling certaintly didn't make this thing more popular, and their timing was interesting.

^ I concur