Free Republic

Feeling misled? You certainly should. Congress created a law so complex that it occupies between 2,400 and 2,800 pages depending on who says what, almost all of them unread by the people who voted for it. President Obama and his Democratic colleagues told you many things about the law – most of which were either mischaracterizations or outright lies. What Chief Justice John Roberts did was tell the truth, and now we can move forward. This is all on Chief Justice Roberts. The four liberals who concurred with him don’t believe that the individual mandate is a tax. They firmly...

But judges are also not hired as political philosophers, Burkean or otherwise. Their legitimacy comes from a credible application of the law. And the outcome of the health care case came down to one point of law: Roberts' interpretation of the statute as a constitutional tax rather than an unconstitutional mandate. In his ruling, Roberts admits this view is hardly the most obvious one. "The question is not whether that is the most natural interpretation of the mandate, but only whether it is a 'fairly possible' one." The problem is that Roberts' interpretation is not fairly, or even remotely, possible....