I told you so.
Quite apart from the problem of the Court rewriting the legislation's penalty as a tax, which amounts to rewriting the dictionary, will every man, woman and child in the country pay the exact same insurance premium, and the exact same tax if they do not purchase?
HELL NO, in violation of the constitution's direct taxation provisions if the mandate is a tax and not a penalty as the Court now declares. What the Court's legerdemain on the penalty has done is transformed health insurance premiums themselves into unequal direct taxes, in violation of the constitution.
From the opinion, here:
Finally, we must observe that rewriting §5000A as a tax in order to sustain its constitutionality would force us to confront a difficult constitutional question: whether this is a direct tax that must be apportioned among the States according to their population. Art. I, §9, cl. 4. Perhaps it is not (we have no need to address the point); but the meaning of the Direct Tax Clause is famously unclear, and its application here is a question of first impression that deserves more thoughtful consideration than the lick-and-a-promise accorded by the Government and its supporters. The Government’s opening brief did not even address the question—perhaps because, until today, no federal court has accepted the implausible argument that §5000A is an exercise of the tax power. And once respondents raised the issue, the Government devoted a mere 21 lines of its reply brief to the issue. Petitioners’ Minimum Coverage Reply Brief 25. At oral argument, the most prolonged statement about the issue was just over 50 words. Tr. of Oral Arg. 79 (Mar. 27, 2012). One would expect this Court to demand more than fly-by-night briefing and argument before deciding a difficult constitutional question of first impression.
