--H.L. Mencken, The Baltimore Evening Sun, July 26, 1920
Posted on 07/01/2012 10:30:29 AM PDT by Signalman
Obama underlings have been on TV ever since the ruling stating that the mandate is a penalty, not a tax. But SC Justice Roberts said it was a tax. I think the reason the Obama crowd is saying it's a penalty is because they know that if the mandate is officially a tax, it can be repealed by the Congress with a simple majority of 51 Senators (and President Romney signs it into law).
So, is the mandate officially and legally a tax, or can it possibly be argued with success by the Dems that it's a penalty, so it can't be repealed?
OMG this is what those dam liberals will get us into. But how so true that chart is. Like that post there should be only 3 people involved in Health Care: Doctor, Pharmacy, & ME!!! This Kenyan crap is getting us into a HellHole.
http://lockerz.com/s/221367985
Is there really a difference when you get right down to it? A dollar is a dollar is a dollar.
yes
and unconstitutional
They can call it whatever they want, but the SCOTUS called it a tax. Now we just need a speaker with a pair that isn’t crying to lead the way.
The controversy seems to be like hemorrhoids to the left and I feel like passing them some creme full of salt.
As long as the left is so worried its a tax in the penalty phase then thats is what it is.
Its ure as heck isn’t a bonus points reward plan.
Because Congress has broad authority to raise taxes. But it cannot fine or penalize you for doing something over which it has no Constitutional authority.
If the IRS is going to collect it, if it’s going to take 15K new IRS agents to do the job, and if it’s due on April 15, it’s a tax.
Good of the court to call Obama on it.
Also good of the court to give Congress an easy way out by designating it a budgetary item and allowing for easy repeal, if we do the job in November.
Whether it's a tax law or not, my understanding is that it can be filibustered and a 3/5 majority can be necessary for repeal, but somebody else will know better.
They say it's not a tax because no politician wants to admit in an election year to have raised taxes. So they call tax increases "user fees." They can't call this a user fee, so they call it a penalty.
It is a penalty, but as such it wouldn't be constitutional, so the court calls it a tax. It's confusing, I know, but politicians and lawyers like it that way.
We NEVER needed 60 votes to overturn 0bamacare. NEVER.
Because the Bill was passed as a budget reconciliation measure which bypassed the rules of the Senate, it can be repealed the same way: with 51 votes. Doesn't matter if it was a tax, a penalty, or an exercise of the commerce power.
There is NO silver lining in this idiotic and dangerous ruling.
--H.L. Mencken, The Baltimore Evening Sun, July 26, 1920
We NEVER needed 60 votes to overturn 0bamacare. NEVER.
Because the Bill was passed as a budget reconciliation measure which bypassed the rules of the Senate, it can be repealed the same way: with 51 votes. Doesn't matter if it was a tax, a penalty, or an exercise of the commerce power.
There is NO silver lining in this idiotic and dangerous ruling.
The governement regulation and control of public entities IN THIS MANNER is not authorized under the general welfare clause or the interstate commerce clause and certainly does not fit the enumerated powers.
I blame the five "justices" who did not do their job of interpreting constitutionality, but instead twisted a morsel of fabricated fact (that it is a tax contrary to what the content of the bill details) in order to justify their personal paradigm of socialism.
Even if it is in fact a tax is not their business, taxation is certainly at the discretion of congress. the issue in question was this ; does congress have the authority to regulate public entities and force the people to fund their imposition ?
it is exactly the same as if they passed "the Affordable Car Act", forcing a tax in order to make you buy a car, with 300 pages detailing how they will control each car company and how they will decide what car you will have , the fact that it is funded by a tax does NOT address the constitutionality of the act but is merly a deflection and dereliction of the duties of a cheif justice
Who is Rogers?
In as much as the SCOTUS is the final arbiter of the interpretation of the laws of the United States, as well as the Constitution, it is a tax.
It is a peculiar tax, esp. considering it was levied at the behest of leftist who have a visceral horror of regressive taxes and an irrational belief that progressive taxes are “fair”: a regressive income tax which is waived on persons covered by health insurance policies that meet desiderata specified at the whim of the Secretary of HHS, persons deemed to be in ‘hardship’ by the HHS, and members of certain religious groups.
It is regressive both at the bottom end — there is a minimum tax — and at the upper end — there is a maximum tax. Otherwise it is levied as a percentage of gross adjusted income.
It's like two mints in one!
Its a penalty for NON participation of the socialist health care unions.
You buy a car, you then for economic reasons decide to ride a bicycle instead but the state fines you for suspending the auto insurance on it even though it will not be driven.
And if you fail to pay the tax they will take the car, your paycheck and all you own.
Its a tax to die fighting against it because its a tax waiting to kill.
"Suppose Congress enacted a statute providing that every taxpayer who owns a house without energy efficient windows must pay $50 to the IRS. The amount due is adjusted based on factors such as taxable income and joint filing status, and is paid along with the taxpayer's income tax return. Those whose income is below the filing threshold need not pay. The required payment is not called a 'tax,' a 'penalty,' or anything else. No one would doubt that this law imposed a tax, and was within Congress’s power to tax. That conclusion should not change simply because Congress used the word 'penalty' to describe the payment. Interpreting such a law to be a tax would hardly '[i]mpos[e] a tax through judicial legislation.' Post, at 25. Rather, it would give practical effect to the Legislature’s enactment."
Now that I've studied the opinion, my interpretation is this:
Roberts argues two points (note: Not using these words--I'm extrapolating on my own):
So the argument is that since Congress could have achieved the same result--with precisely the same effects on everyone--by changing the income tax law, and since the assertion that X is a penalty is not the assertion that X cannot also be a tax (any tax may be intended as a penalty,) then interpreting the penalty as a tax is the interpretation of the law required by the Court's past precedents regarding how laws must be interpreted.
I will have more to say on this later.
Obama’s lawyer called it a “Tax Penalty if you will” when asked by the court. Obama has known it had to be a tax all along to get through the courts.
OK, its a taxing penalty. We need to ‘apply attacks’ to ObamaScam all the way to November.
False dichotomy.
Budget bills are governed under special rules called "reconciliation" which do not allow filibusters. Reconciliation once only applied to bills that would reduce the budget deficit, but since 1996 it has been used for all matters related to budget issues.
Something I didn't know. But apparently the health care bill was originally passed under reconciliation rules (they cleverly put it in the title "Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010"). So passing it or repealing it could both be done with a simple majority of Senators and no possibility of filibuster.
FWIW, filibuster used to mean Senators speaking for hours and reading out of cookbooks and phonebooks. Lately, it seems like it's more of a formal thing. You need a 3/5th vote in the Senate to close off debate, but it doesn't mean a Senator is actually speaking for hours on end.
He meant the traitor Arnold.
The fact that Roberts interpreted the mandate penalty as a tax does not mean he would rule it Constitutional, if a case came before the Court that persuasively made the argument that the mandate penalty-tax was not a Constitutionally-permissible tax.
In the context of the case that was before the Court, the only standard was whether the penalty could reasonably be seen as a tax under the taxing power, not whether such a tax was beyond any possibility of being successfully challenged Constitutionally. One reason for that is because the plaintiffs lacked standing to argue that point. To have standing on that issue, a plaintiff must first have paid the tax. Because of that, the Constitutionality of the tax as a tax was not a matter before the Court.
And that's one of the secrets to understanding court decisions.
The the SCOTUS decision on Obamacare is pure sophistry. By that same kind of twisted reasoning a shovel could easily be deemed to be a chair.
Is Obamacare a tax or a penalty?
Actually, it doesn’t matter what you call it. What matters is WHO is calling it what they say it is.
For the sake of arguement, I would call it both a tax and a penalty. To Obama, I would call it a tax. To Roberts, I would call it a penalty.
That’s how they play politics these days. It’s time we learn to play the same way. To quote a well-known person around here: “Freep them”.
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