The Supreme Oxymorons - Paul Jacob - [page]

The Supreme Oxymorons - Paul Jacob - [page]: With the Supreme Court’s decision in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, Obamacare has achieved its first milestone: The repudiation of logic, the Orwellian assertion that A both is and is not A.

The massive healthcare package, officially titled the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, requires that individuals buy medical insurance. The law imposes a fine on those who fail to purchase the government-approved and regulated insurance.

The legislation refers to this financial penalty 18 times. It never once refers to it as a tax. (Note: you can find tax hikes aplenty elsewhere in the colossal new law.)

Its principal booster, President Barack H. Obama, repeatedly insisted mandate’s penalty wasn’t a tax. And as Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in his dissent, “We have no doubt that Congress knew precisely what it was doing when it rejected an earlier version of this legislation that imposed a tax instead of a requirement-with-penalty.”

But Chief Justice John Roberts, a George W. Bush-nominee, joined the four liberal justices to declare that what was not a tax, when proposed and passed, now is a tax — so that it could be declared constitutional under Congress’s taxing power. Roberts explains:

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