Witness Kelo v. New London, where private homes were put at peril by municipal scheming that interestingly, resulted in real “blight”, when the “development” schemes evaporated.

But, hey why not bulldoze a few homes if we can just assume the state and it’s friends really will make life grand if they can just take what they refused to purchase. From this, we know that “legal” isn’t necessary sagacious.

When did “the law” become aracana to be discussed by a cartel of modern pharisees, who need only clever wordplay for the arrogation of arbitrary, if not plenary authority.

Despite all pretenses to the contrary, one cannot arrive at principles of law like physical sciences, and the old saw that “the law is what the judge says it is”, is something that applies more and more generallyand absolutely, at odds with self-governance. Of course, Samuel Johnson made a much more succint and accurate characterization.

Pardon me if I dismiss the dark arts of “legal scholars” and their tortuous interpretations, even when published in the echo chambers of law reviews and met with acclaim by the barristry.

Only God knows whether the Roberts Obamacare opinion was capitulation to the public threats of Obama and Leahy, who clearly threatened to subject the thin reeds of Court authority to public disdain if he didn’t uphold their takeover of medicine.

Unfortunately, John Roberts will not be subject to a question of dereliction of duty, there’s only hope that his opinion will be judged as harshly as Plessy v. Ferguson, Buck v. Bell and Korematsu v. United States and a myriad of other abominations (let’s not forget Harry Blackmun’s magnum opus) that should tell us that being “Supreme” doesn’t mean inerrant or infallible.

The reason an income tax does not have to be levied according to enumeration or apportionment, is that those requirements were removed for income taxes by the Sixteenth Amendment, not because it’s a tax on transactions.

The apportionment requirement is not idiotic, if for no other reason than it serves as a barrier to the voracious appetite of government and the unlimited creativity of legislators and executives in appropriating funds for their use.

Although it’s meaning obscured, it is by the fact that we have in just under a century, completely accepted the idea of the federal government enacting tax code that mocks equality before the law, is as much designed to affect behavior as finance the government, uses frustration and exhaustion as implicit tools of compliance, and is as often as not, arbitrary and capricious.

(Hint, think about why is it you pay a special penalty tax of 10% on early withdrawals of your pension/tax deferred accounts until you are 59 AND 1/2?, i.e., not 59, not 60?)