“The title isn’t quite right. They ruled that Obamacare WAS a tax, not necessarily that it was a permissible one....or did I not get that correct?”
Seems they ruled that as a mandate it’s unenforceable, but enforceable as a tax penalty which is a clear contradiction. That would still make it a mandate. Basically they ruled that purchasing health insurance can’t be mandated, but at the same time a tax can be imposed for not purchasing it, in other words we can’t force you to buy it, but we’ll tax you and force you to buy it. So the question is what kind of a tax is it since that doesn’t seem defined in the legislation, other than a tax on a person for non-compliance? Does it meet the criteria of a constitutionally legislated tax? I did read on some other threads that it may no be a permissible tax and that it improperly originated in the Senate and not the House.
The dissenting justices wrote that something can be either a tax or a penalty but not both. These are well defined legal concepts and are mutually exclusive. And it's pretty obvious that the mandate functions as a penalty, not a tax.
Actually it does function as a tax, but only in a nod nod wink wink kind of way -- in that it doesn't explicitly make it unlawful to defy the mandate and instead pay the tax/penalty. But by the formal letter of the statute, it's a penalty. The dissenting justices judged it on the formal language whereas Roberts broke ranks and engaged it on the nod nod wink wink level. He accepted the Government's implicit (but unstated or ambiguously stated) premise that the penalty is really a tax, whereas the others rejected it.
The result is an opinion that piles his own gamesmanship on top of the Government's gamesmanship giving us something completely incoherent. The dissenting justices were right in wanting to just chop the whole thing off and throw it in the fire. But Roberts decided that that was too extreme so now we're stuck with a mess.