Thats exactly the point, Roberts is saying beware who you elect to tax you. He saved us from the commerce clause which your rank and file American doesn’t know from a hill of beans. Congress is going to screw us, we can better deal with the open and obvious screwing, at the ballot box.
And more importantly becareful who you elect to appoint Supreme Court Justices.
I know what Roberts is saying about elections having consequences, and beds having been made we need to lie in them.
But if absolutely anything can be done by the gov’t as long as a “penalty” is associated with it, we have been “saved” from nothing.
This “tax” empowers the secretary of HHS to intrude into every decision that a doctor makes with his patients.
That’s not at all like saying “you buy tires, you pay a federal tax.”
Maybe he closed the door on future expansion of the commerce clause, but he ripped the roof off of the entire structure if this 2,000 page grant of power to HHS is a “tax.”