Posted on 11/19/2014 5:12:10 AM PST by Servant of the Cross
At the time of this writing, six Gruber videos have been released and gone viral, as they say in YouTube land. These are the videos of course, in which Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber lets the cat out of the bag on the process of enacting the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, aka The Greatest Consumer Fraud Perpetrated on the American People, Ever.
Of the many Gruber quotes burning up the internet, I was especially struck by this one, to which Charles Krauthammer refers in a recent article:
Gruber said, the bills authors manipulated the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, which issues gold-standard cost estimates of any legislative proposal: This bill was written in a tortured way to make sure CBO did not score the mandate as taxes. Why? Because if CBO scored the mandate as taxes, the bill dies. And yet, the president himself openly insisted that the individual mandate what you must pay the government if you fail to buy health insurance was not a tax.
Obviously, writing a bill in a tortured way to prevent scoring the individual mandate as a tax is to admit that the individual mandate is, in fact, a tax.
But the Gruber did something else, too, which was to trigger a memory of another, earlier quote (emphasis mine, citation omitted):
In answering that constitutional question [of whether the Affordable Care Acts individual mandate is a tax], this Court follows a functional approach, [d]isregarding the designation of the exaction, and viewing its substance and application.
Such an analysis suggests that the shared responsibility payment [i.e.¸ the individual mandate] may for constitutional purposes be considered a tax.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
“The IRS will hold back the amount of the fee from any future tax refunds. There are no liens, levies, or criminal penalties for failing to pay the fee.”
Is anyone sure this is entirely correct? The organization that withholds refunds is the Financial Management Service. This office can withhold refunds from any federal payment to a recipient.
So if you don’t have a refund to snatch up, they can also withhold it from future social security payments.
So if you try to get away with things by not doing insurance and structuring your taxes so you don’t get a refund (have to send a check every year), are you just racking up fines and interest that will ultimately taken from SS?
Juan Roberts should be impeached.
Assume they have something on him. History would forgive whatever that is. History will never forgive that he traitored us on Obamacare.
Even if it is a tax, there cannot be a precedent set where Congress gets around the politics of passing a tax increase by lying that it's not a tax, only to have the courts later -- after it's passed -- rule to be, in fact, a tax.
The point is moot. The dirty deed is already done. The law is passed that otherwise might not have.
-PJ
Nah. I'm pretty sure all Roberts would have to do today is take the kids to Mexico, then re-enter the country illegally. Then they would be amnestied. In fact, it would probably be a smart investment, as they would get illegal alien affirmative action preferences and benefits for the rest of their lives.
“compel free citizens to enter into private contracts”
Right - if the law was written such that you were taxed X amount and could deduct the value of privately obtained insurance from X, it would be more appropriate.
Also,,,it doesn't have a severability clause......so any part found unconstitutional makes the whole thing void...
and what about the many changes to the bill that were pasted in by Obama without any voting process.
“Than just repeal this tax....”
Plus, since the bill was passed under revenue rules, meaning they only needed 50 votes for cloture, that can bring a repeal to the floor w/50 too.
Too bad McConnell won’t do that, though.
Because it wouldn't have passed. Nelson, Landrieu and one or two others as well as some Blue Dogs in the House would not have signed on to a bill that openly raised taxes. It was worded to give those members cover when they voted for it.
“If in fact its a tax, and the bill originated in the Senate, then its unconstitutional.”
This is the black-and-white correct conclusion and at the time of the USSC decision I could not understand why this wasn’t offered as the straightforward reason why the bill had no legitimacy. It should simply have been erased just as if I had created my own bill raising my salary by 500 percent with annual cost-of-living increases of 100 percent. The ACA originated outside of Constitutionally-prescribed location just as does the “iacovatx pay fairness” bill.
“The Greatest Consumer Fraud Perpetrated on the American People, Ever.”.....
How are we to handle all those new “prisoners” who pulled that fraud off? Worse, what Attorney General will be the one to prosecute them all. That could take the rest of my lifetime.........
Geeeeeeeeesh, I wish you people would speed things up.
He’s a GD whore if he won’t.
It will for the next 30 or so years be impossible to know if Roberts was a traitor, a genius who thought he was handing the Congress a constitutional way to eliminate this, or a fool who bungled the law. Most Freepers think the former, but I'm not sure.
All that said, I COMPLETELY disagree with your approach that "well, look at all the bad stuff that happened and opened peoples' eyes." This is trying to win by losing, and is almost always a bad plan. I fail to see how we have gained by having this obscenity now fixed into American law. Yes, horrible laws can be overturned (Sherman Silver Purchase Act, Prohibition), but their destruction is not worth the object lesson.
I hated this article - queasy thesis, wrong conclusion.
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I call the weak brained analysis verbal gymnastics. I do not care how they characterize it, forcing someone to buy something under duress, which means you are using state action to steal his personal property, has to be unconstitutional.
I agree with what you said in #10.
It merely proves that Roberts is one of the stupid Americans Gruber was talking about.
Roberts had to twist and rewrite the law to make it “constitutional”, even though he knew better.
If you’re fined for an offense, such as speeding or hiring an illegal alien, is that a tax or a penalty? Well, the Obamacare penalty is the same thing as that.
Isn’t that what every tax does? We are “forced” to buy fire trucks, police uniforms, road graders...and pay people to use them. If you fail to pay, what happens?
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