The Supreme Court ruling this morning on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) upheld the law, including the mandate compelling all Americans to buy insurance. What I've seen on their reasoning so far seems to me very odd. For three years the Democrats, from the president on down, have been assuring us that the penalty one must pay if one does not purchase insurance is not a tax. They have been adamant about this because Mr. Obama repeatedly promised in his campaign that he would not raise taxes on families making under $250,000 and if the penalty is a tax, rather than a fine, it would violate this promise.
Here are a few instances of the Democrats' insistence that they weren't trying to impose a tax:
Now, as I understand it, the rationale used by the majority of the Court in upholding the mandate is that the penalty is indeed a tax and that since Congress has the constitutional authority to levy taxes, the mandate passes constitutional muster.
In other words, the Court is saying that the president and his surrogates lied to the American people to get us to accept the ACA, but since lying is not unconstitutional, the ACA stands. (There is, of course, the remote possibility that all the Democrats and their vast army of lawyers and advisors were simply mistaken and that they really didn't realize it was a tax when in fact it was. One could believe this, I suppose, just as one could believe that Santa Claus visits every house in the world on Christmas Eve.)
This is the victory the left is celebrating. If all the people in that video were telling the truth and the mandate was indeed not a tax, it should have been struck down, but since it is not what they represented it to the American people to be it's constitutional.
Either they were telling the truth on the video, in which case the majority of the Court has committed a grievous error, or the majority was correct to rule as they did because the Democrats, including the president, were lying about the nature of the mandate. Thus, either the Court made a terrible mistake or our president and his people are egregiously dishonest.
So far from going around high-fiving because they won the case, the Democrats right now should be either saddened at the Court's misjudgment or deeply ashamed of their own behavior, or both.