Voters were lazily assuming that the court would take care of this infection for them, but now they have to realize that it is going to become a flesh eating bacteria on our economy if we don’t amputate it immediately. And that surgery has to be done by voters, en masse, kicking out Obama.

I never assumed the Supreme Court would strike down Obamacare (though I did think that this knife in my back would have Anthony Kennedy’s fingerprints.)

1) While Roberts was part of the narrow-ruling Hein majority, it was actually Alito who wrote the majority.

2) There is apparently some language in the law that speaks of the penalty as a tax. Otherwise you would not have had the Tax Notes special report by Willis and Chung, (7/12/2010) arguing that “The act’s penalty is styled as a tax. Congress arguably did this to finesse commerce clause problems.” These Tax Notes writers wanted Obamacare overturned–their argument was that assuming the penalty for not purchasing really was a tax, it was still unconstitutional because it was not an apportioned tax (see Article I, sect. 9). I’ve no opinion on that argument–what matters here is that these close readers of the mandate provisions of the law, say that in some way (regardless of what Obama said) it styled itself a tax.