“How can a penalty exist if there is no mandate?”
Well, it’s not a “penalty,” is it? It’s now a tax. The “mandate” tells us who is to be taxed, but then it’s not a mandate. It’s an order without force of law clarifying the tax, which itself contains its own implied order.
What you have to understand, here, is that the law was rewritten by Roberts. The way it was passed there is a mandate and a penalty. The way it’s been interpreted is there’s a tax/penalty only. That’s because whereas the feds have no power to order you to own insurance they do have the power to tax.
Can you be unfamiliar with the tactic of social engineering via the tax code? Its simple. Whensoever governments don’t want to outright order behavior, because they lack the power or because they fear the people, they induce people by making things more or less expensive via taxes, subsidies, loopholes, etc. In this case since they cannot legally order people to buy insurance via the commerce clause or whatever, they are left with penalizing people through the tax code for not having insurance. Which SCOTUS says is okay, even though it would not be okay if all they had was the mandate with no tax behind it.
They’ll speak as if the madate still exists, but that’s just talk. It only exists in regards as it’s tied to the penalty as justified by the taxing power. It has no power on its own. They’ll use doublespeak like: “the Government asks the Court to view the mandate as imposing a tax on those who do not buy that product.” That doesn’t means what it says. What the government asked and what Roberts gave them is for the penalty, not the mandate, to be a tax on those who don’t have insurance.
The mandate only tells us what are the conditions for being taxed, which does not constitute being a mandate.
“There’s nothing to penalize if the mandate doesn’t exist and it sure looks to me like the mandate exists as a tax.”
The mandate does not exist as a tax. The tax is the tax. The tax implies a mandate, to the extent that we don’t need explicit language to order us to buy insurance. That there is explicit language to that effect, which we call “the mandate” is a historical curiosity. It is a holdover from before Roberts turned the penalty into a tax.
You can persist in calling the tax a mandate, as most no doubt will. But that’s loose talk, and has nothing to do with actual law.