First, the mandate isn't a tax at all. The primary function of a tax is to raise revenue. The mandate's prime function is to punish behavior. It's a regulatory penalty, not a tax. Justice Roberts admitted that it's not a tax in his analysis of the anti-injunction law - he found that the mandate was NOT a tax for purposes of getting jurisdiction, then he turned around and in the same opinion found that it's a tax for constitutional purposes.
Second, the mandate is clearly a direct tax; i.e. it places the taxpayer in a direct relationship with the IRS. The Constitution requires that such taxes be subject to apportionment among the States. Since apportionment - as required by the Constitution - would have rendered the mandate impracticable in application, Justice Roberts perfunctorily declared it not a direct tax, even though it places each and every American into a direct relationship with the IRS!
This is the worst decision I've ever read. It is the biggest federal power grab in nearly a century. To my mind the decisions this week - including the AZ decision - are clear grounds for secession, as Justice Scalia alluded to.
I want out. I don't want to have to call Pelosi, Reed, Frank, Obama et al. and the millions of fools who elected them my countrymen any longer. I'm done with this sick place.
“Nonsense. The Constitution never gave Congress unlimited power to tax.....”
You are still making the Federalist case for adoption of the Constitution where the federalists urged the state legislatures to ratify, saying in effect:
“In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.” The states ratified, but the blandishments of the Federalists proved to be a siren’s song.
A Chief Justice of the Supreme Court once said:
“We are under a Constitution, BUT THE CONSTITUTION IS WHAT THE JUDGES SAY IT IS, and the judiciary is the safeguard of our liberty and of our property under the Constitution.”
The same founder who vainly hoped Leviathan could be bound by the chains of the Constitution seems to have been rather prescient when he said over a hundred years earlier:
“The Constitution, on this hypothesis, is a mere thing of wax in the hands of the Judiciary, which they may twist and shape into any form they please.”
Sure, and that's why an "excise tax on wages" was put in place during the Civil War some 50 years before the 16th Amendment.
The 16th simply removed the income tax from apportionment. The Supreme Court ruled shortly after the 16th went into being that the amendment gave them no new taxing power.
You may want to read up on this. Its not as cut and dried as anyone thinks.
Keep in mind, the Congress can levy any "direct tax" they want. They just have to send it out for apportionment as opposed to collecting from the individual directly. The tax still stands.
A lot of what the anti-Federalists were saying is now coming true.