Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the Court, held while the “individual mandate is not a valid exercise of Congress’s power under the Commerce Clause and the Necessary and Proper Clause,” it is valid as an exercise of the taxing power granted the federal government by the Constitution.
One practical effect of today’s ruling is that by removing the ObamaCare scheme from its safe and secure Commerce Clause mooring, the Supreme Court has rewritten the law and converted the individual mandate into a tax, thus placing it within the authority of Congress to define.
This is judicial activism at its finest. The Supreme Court was so determined to endow the federal government with unlimited power and to toss the notion of enumerated powers onto the scrap heap of history that it was willing to effect a fundamental change to the law as enacted by Congress and the President.
Today, the U.S. Supreme Court not only re-wrote ObamaCare, but it simultaneously united the power of making and interpreting law into their own unelected hands.
If the Obamacare mandate is a tax, then doesn’t that invalidate the HHS mandate against churches, since they are tax exempt?