It is not Chief Justice Roberts who is at fault, but the congress and state legislatures long ago that gave us the Sixteenth Amendment. Once Congress was granted the power to tax incomes without restraints on the form of the tax (as, for instance, requiring it be levied as a fixed percentage of income regardless of source or amount, or forbidding the imposition of a higher rate of taxation on any class of persons on any basis other than the aggregate amount of income earned), the possibility of Congress doing exactly what it did in the Obamacare law — laying an income tax on one class of persons while exempting others has been constitutional.
I recall a story about the eminent mathematician Kurt Goedel, who when he was becoming a U.S. citizen in the late 1940’s was asked by the immigration judge whether the U.S. Constitution would permit the establishment of a Nazi-style tyranny. The more socially adept Einstein had to restrain Goedel from explaining exactly how a tyranny could, in fact be established, within the restraints of the Constitution. I wonder whether Pelosi and her crew of wreckers didn’t make the same discovery as Goedel in this regard. As both Daniel Webster and Chief Justice Marshall noted, the power to tax is the power to destroy, and tyrants wield destruction as their mode of rule.
Thus, they often cross the line from being smart and intelligent, and from their real area of expertise into being "clever" for the sake of being thought of as ingenious.
Unfortunately, cleverness often comes at the expense of clarity, and the one main thing that people want and should expect from the courts, judges and "the law" in general is clarity.
What we have gotten from Chief Justice John Roberts was anything but clarity. In fact, with his "clever" decision, supposedly trying to show that the court is apolitical, he has single-handedly rewritten the un-Affordable Care Act from ObamaCareMandate into ObamaCareTax in such a way that all parties can argue and define what it means any way it fits them for any given purpose; he has rewritten the Constitution by granting the power to "tax" the non-activity (apparently creating entirely new and separate category of federal "taxation" which is different from the now "usual" income, sales and excise taxes - a "behavior tax"?); he has given huge new authority and powers to the Congress, the President and his bureaucracy and to the courts to "interpret" any law any which way they desire, with impunity, by abdicating the Supreme Court's responsibility of defending the citizens' freedoms and the purse by curtailing the natural tendency of the federal government to self-expand at the expense of citizenry.
Instead, like King Solomon, John Roberts "cleverly" decided to cut the political "baby" in half, and what he gave us was a stupefyingly discombobulating and muddled decision which will be abused as the precedent and fought over for decades - in other words, the exact opposite of clarity.
Telling the people that the Court can't save them from electing the "bad" government - in effect, blaming the people for "electing the government they deserve" - may have been his "clever" unofficial verdict on the merits or consequences of ObamaCare bill, but his decision to give it justification by rewriting it so it could "comply with Constitution" was contrary to the very ideal of Constitutional restraint on powers of the government.
U.S. citizens may have to live with Roberts' mucked up decision for a long time, his reputation will be mired in it forever.