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Sometimes the law is what it is — an ass. By communal consent, we tolerate outcomes that don't always suit us because the alternative of settling disagreements in the streets is less appealing.
One of several ironies of Thursday's ruling is that liberals are crowing about winning something they didn't actually win. Yes, the court ruled that Obamacare is constitutional, but not on the basis of the commerce clause, as proposed by the Obama administration. Instead, the court ruled that the individual mandate to purchase insurance falls under Congress's authority to tax and therefore is constitutional.
In other words, according to the high court, Obamacare constitutes a tax, which the administration and the legislation's authors repeatedly insisted was not the case. It is considered a tax because the government will "tax" those Americans who decline to purchase health insurance. This alone is the reason Obamacare passed constitutional muster.
Meanwhile, the commerce clause remains intact, which is cause for conservatives to celebrate. It is not as elastic as it might have been, had the court embraced President Obama's justification for the mandate. We will not, in fact, all have to eat broccoli, as Justice Antonin Scalia proposed in one of his characteristically humorous hypotheticals during oral arguments.
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