So we now know Congress cannot make us eat broccoli under the Commerce Clause, but can do so by enacting a broccoli mandate and imposing a failure-to-eat-broccoli tax. The lack of a limiting principle was thought to be fatal to the government’s Commerce Clause argument, but now there seems nothing Congress cannot mandate, as long as it does so with a failure-to-do-it tax. Congress need not even call it a tax, because calling it a tax may preclude it from being enacted. The name given to the ObamaCare penalty was the “shared responsibility payment.”
Who needs the Commerce Clause, with its subtle distinctions between commerce and non-commerce, activity and non-activity, regulation of commerce vs. creation of commerce, when you can simply levy a tax while assuring the public it is not a tax? Congress can enact a “shared responsibility payment” to accompany its mandate, even though Congress has no power under the Commerce Clause — the provision under which Congress purported to act – to issue the mandate, and the mandate thereby becomes valid. You can almost hear the Founders saying, “Are you serious? Are you serious?”
Over at SCOTUSblog, Ilya Shapiro’s perceptive post is entitled, “We won everything but the case.” It is worth reading in its entirety. Scott Rasmussen notes that ObamaCare has already lost in the court of public opinion. The electorate will have the opportunity to use its own constitutional power in 130 days.