Romney sides with the minority opinion, the mandate is unconstitutional. He can still hold that either it’s a tax or it is unconstitutional.
This is Washington Post b-effing-s.
It seems to me what the Romney “camp” was trying to claim (clumsily, what’s new?) is that Roberts’ corkscrewing the mandate into his opinion as a tax was preposterous.
Roberts couldn’t possibly uphold the mandate as a penalty, so he pulled an executive branch taxing authority out of his cowardly arse and validated the mandate thusly...
The Romney camp is just too “nuanced” (read: gutless) to make their point with a sharpened f’ing edge to it.
As much as I hate to agree with Mitt I don’t think its a tax either. Its a penalty. The whole thing is unconstitutional and Roberts has further undermined our national stability by coming up with his tortured opinion calling the individual mandate a tax. If you purchase something you pay a tax if you refuse to purchase it you pay a penalty. It makes you wonder about the guy’s reasoning abilities.