A criminal law requiring everyone to buy broccoli probably would be unconstitutional. At least I would hope so. But a tax on everyone, with a corresponding tax credit if you buy broccoli, is no different than things that are already done in the tax code.
You pay income taxes at a certain level. But if you have a mortgage you get to subtract mortgage interest and lower your taxes. Is that a law that requires everyone to have a mortgage? No, of course not. Same thing here. You don't have to have health insurance. But if you don't you owe an extra amount on your taxes.
The court could find no logical way to make that into something other than what it is. A tax to pay for health care, with a tax credit if you already have insurance. As I've already said, this new case is something completely different.
Except that this isn’t a tax credit for buying. It’s a penalty for not buying. That’s the difference, and it’s where Roberts chose to rewrite the law.
You’re not required to have a mortgage, nor are you required to do any of the other things that the code incentivizes. But you are required to have health insurance. if not, you pay this additional amount. That’s different from the mortgage deduction or the personal exemption or any of the numerous other exemptions. Roberts knew that, but pretended it was the same. You MUST have health insurance under the law.
So it’s not a tax, it’s a penalty, as the law itself says. Yet Roberts chose to treat it as a tax, thus rewriting the law.
And having shown his willingness to rewrite it, there is no reason he couldn’t rewrite it again.
A criminal law requiring everyone to buy broccoli probably would be unconstitutional.
It's PRECSIELY, EXACTLY,/i> the same thing. I set that up to mirror Obamacare's structure. So if that's unconstitutional, then the individual mandate is unconstitutional. But Roberts simply decided that it was waht it obviously, clearly was NOT, in order to get a result he wanted to get. Period.