The trouble is, I’m not sure Roberts did misinterpret the Constitution. Once the Sixteenth Amendment was in place, the possibility of Congress levying even a confiscatory tax on incomes and waiving it for persons engaging in some behavior has been Constitutional. The “penalty” was always a regressive income tax on those who are not in certain groups (notably people with HHS-compliant health insurance, the very poor, Amishmen and Muslims): it’s a percentage of AGI, but with a minimum tax (depending on the year from $95 to $695) and a maximum tax (the cost of an HHS approve “Bronze” health-insurance policy).
Neither the lies of the Obama-Pelosi-Reid cabal in denying that it is a tax, nor the fact that no one before them noticed this effect of the Sixteenth Amendment changes the facts.
I think, however, that a challenge to the provision that Amishmen, Muslims, etc. are exempt on religious grounds is now in order. There is abundant precedent that unlike military service, in which a requirement of bearing arms would prevent the free exercise of pacifist creeds (hence the notion of conscientious objector status and the disproportionate number of Quaker and Buddhist corpsmen during times of military conscription) religious objections to the purpose of a tax do not exempt one from paying it.
Also, the IPAB (a.k.a. “Death Panel”) provision should be challenged on two grounds: it is a Constitutionally impermissible attempt to bind future Congresses, and it creates governmental interference in the patient-physician relationship, which, according to the precedent established in Roe v. Wade is protected from governmental interference by the “generalized right to privacy”.
(Remember that was the court’s reasoning in Roe v. Wade — the basis for the decision had nothing to do with abortion per se. I wonder how the left would react to that dilemma: overturn Roe or invalidate all government attempts to take over health care.)
The trouble is, I’m not sure Roberts did misinterpret the Constitution.
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Please read the dissent after which you will be absolutely sure that Roberts “misinterpreted” the Constitution.
You will learn the difference between a “tax” and a “penalty”, and why this is a “penalty” and cannot be construed as a tax by any reasonable means.