The Vindication of John Roberts

American Thinker ^ | 11/19/2014 | Gene Schwimmer

[Servant of the Cross]

At the time of this writing, six “Gruber videos” have been released and “gone viral,” as they say in YouTube land. These are the videos of course, in which “Obamacare architect” Jonathan Gruber lets the cat out of the bag on the process of enacting the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, aka The Greatest Consumer Fraud Perpetrated on the American People, Ever.

Of the many Gruber quotes burning up the internet, I was especially struck by this one, to which Charles Krauthammer refers in a recent article:

Gruber said, the bill’s authors manipulated the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which issues gold-standard cost estimates of any legislative proposal: “This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes.” Why? Because “if CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies.” And yet, the president himself openly insisted that the individual mandate – what you must pay the government if you fail to buy health insurance – was not a tax.

Obviously, writing a bill “in a tortured way” to prevent scoring the individual mandate as a tax is to admit that the individual mandate is, in fact, a tax.

But the Gruber did something else, too, which was to trigger a memory of another, earlier quote (emphasis mine, citation omitted):

In answering that constitutional question [of whether the Affordable Care Act’s individual mandate is a tax], this Court follows a functional approach, “[d]isregarding the designation of the exaction, and viewing its substance and application.”

Such an analysis suggests that the shared responsibility payment [i.e.¸ the individual mandate] may for constitutional purposes be considered a tax.

[LS]

Well, sorry if I misinterpreted. Still, I don’t ever believe in winning by losing. Too risky, and always puts you in a hole. It’s like saying, “let the other team run the kickoff back for a TD so we will get serious.”

[tanknetter]

I sorta think the same way. I still wish the Court would have dumped it on 10th Amendment grounds, but I can’t deny the benefit the pain created by it’s survival seems to have had on starting to awaken the apathetic American public to the consequences of their poor electoral decisions.

[conservatism_IS_compassion]

That still leaves the question as to whether the tax actually originated in the House (as constitutionally mandated) or in the Senate (which took an existing House bill, excised everything but the bill number (or some such), and inserted Obamacare text to utterly replace it. This was done because Scot Brown suddenly deprived the Gubercrats of their 60th vote for cloture.

IIRC.

[dennisw]

bingo.... you know the back story

[Fledermaus]

Roberts needs to be impeached.

[tarheelswamprat]

this is a war but in NO WAY SHAPE OR FORM is this a true military war with human life at stake.

You have a technical point on the term "military" but you are flatly wrong that human life is not at stake. There will be thousands of needless deaths due to the provisions of the ACA as they go into effect and start destroying the quality of medical care available to the majority of Americans.

In fact they've already started, with the rationing of approved treatments and medications, and the decisions about those being arbitrarily determined by bureaucrats based on collective "program goals" rather than doctors' individual determinations of patients' needs. "Death panels" are already beginning; they just won't ever be acknowledged as such.