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reason the Obama crowd is saying it's a penalty is because they know that if the mandate is officially a tax, it can be repealed by the Congress with a simple majority of 51 Senators (and President Romney signs it into law).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officially and legally a tax, or can it possibly be argued with success by the Dems that it's a penalty, so it can't be repealed?
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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