John Roberts Delivers the Unvarnished Lie

I recently wrote about Antonin Scalia having just delivered the unvarnished truth about the “evil” of illegal immigration.

By now we all have heard today’s fascist Supreme Court ruling on Obamacare: Republican appointee and Chief Justice John Roberts voted with the court’s four statist (Liberal) members and upheld Obama’s socialized medicine law that requires all citizens to buy insurance — from private companies. In doing so, Roberts delivered the unvarnished lie about Obamacare.

There are two questions relating to Roberts: HOW did he do this, and WHY did he do this.

Regarding the “How”, he had to resort to making an argument that Obama’s Solicitor General did not make, and that the Congress itself did not make, when they all hijacked America and passed the monstrosity known as Obamacare:

The unpopular requirement that everyone buy health insurance or pay a penalty — likened by detractors to a rule that everyone purchase broccoli — was unconstitutional as a mandate, Roberts said, but valid as long as it was simply considered a tax. <source>

There are several interesting things about this twist by Roberts — calling the mandate a “tax” in order to give himself a legal basis to uphold the law.

First, Roberts ignored highly public legislative and executive branch deliberations about the individual mandate in which both branches were very firm in their conviction that the requirement and penalty were decidedly not a tax; previous versions of the Obamacare bill had considered the imposition of a tax, but the idea was abandoned as politically untenable. How is it possible that a Supreme Court justice can call something a tax when the bill’s sponsors designed it to be something other than a tax, and when Obama’s Solicitor General flip-flopped on whether to call it a tax during oral arguments? We have a governmental system of “checks and balances”, so where is the check on a Justice who makes something up out of thin air just so that he can have a fig-leaf of an argument to uphold a law that is unconstitutional?

Second, I predicted more than two years ago that calling the mandate a “tax” — after it was deliberately hidden and passed through fraudulent means — was Obama’s only hope. Here is what I wrote on April 8, 2010 <original post>:

Propaganda Alert: Watch Democrats Call Healthcare Penalty a “Tax”

Let’s all have fun keeping a tally of how often the Liberal Media refers to the citizenship penalty (against those who fail to buy health insurance under the new fascist plan) as a “TAX”. Now why would Liberals ever voluntarily call one of their diabolical programs a “Tax”? For one simple reason: this will be their defense in Federal Court when all of the State lawsuits against the mandatory purchase requirements are heard.

That is, the States are going to argue that the Federal government may not require citizens to buy something (such as healthcare) from a third party just by nature of their being citizens. The easiest defense is that the penalties are a kind of tax, and courts are not about to rule that Federal taxation is unconstitutional.

So Democrats will be tax-happy (what else is new?) and whenever the penalty is mentioned they’ll call it a tax. But we know their game and that they are beneath contempt.

Sure enough, Obama’s Justice Department did so, right on cue, which I wrote about two months later on June 19, 2010 <original post>:

A “Tax” they say, just as we knew they would

Back on April 8th, the sword predicted that the marxist administration would respond to states’ challenges of the nationalization of healthcare by labeling the mandatory requirement to buy health insurance as a “TAX” because the Federal government won that battle a long time ago.

And here we are today:

The Justice Department filing describes the penalty as a tax, stating that the law “imposes a tax on the choice of a method to finance the future costs of one’s health care.”

McCollum responded to the Justice Department filings Thursday, claiming that the government’s response contradicted the comments that President Obama made during the health-care debate earlier this year.

“The Justice Department’s defenses clash directly with comments made by President Obama during the debate on the health care reform bill, including the President’s insistence on national television that the purchase mandate was absolutely not a tax. Yet in its motion to dismiss, the Obama administration defends the individual mandate under Congress’ ‘taxing and spending’ power,” said McCollum in a press statement. <sasoc emphasis>

We could say we were prescient and called this one beautifully, but that would be giving ourselves too much credit. After all, how hard is it to observe that President [sic] Obama is a liar, a fascist centralizer, and a bait-and-switch artist and to predict that he’d call his cram-down a “tax”? Not very

I was right about the argument, and right that Obama would hide behind his henchmen as they switched course and use the “tax” word when they had no other choice, after having insisted the exact opposite — that it was not a tax.

But then a diabolical thing happened when Obama’s Solicitor General argued the case before the Supreme Court: he simultaneously used, and retracted, the “It’s a Tax” argument, and got himself mixed up in the process, and laughed at no less:

U.S. Solicitor General Donald Verrilli used the phrase “tax penalty” multiple times to describe the individual mandate’s backstop. He portrayed the fee as a penalty by design, but one that functions as a tax because it’s collected through the tax code.

“General Verrilli, today you are arguing that the penalty is not a tax. Tomorrow you are going to be back and you will be arguing that the penalty is a tax,” said Justice Samuel Alito, in one of the few laugh lines throughout the 90 minutes of argument Monday.

The remark underscores the fine line the White House is walking in its argument. On one hand, it says the backstop is not a tax, because that could subject it to the Anti-Injunction Act — the focal point of Monday’s arguments — and delay a ruling to at least 2015. On the other, they claim that the power to impose a penalty derives from Congress’ broad taxing power. That’s in part because calling it a tax makes defending the mandate easier — Congress’ power to levy taxes is less in question than its power to require people to do things. <source>

What is profound is that Chief Justice John Roberts was actually taken in by this double talk. So instead of Barack Obama having to own the fact that he forced through a monstrous bill that raised taxes on tens of millions of Americans who do not want to purchase health insurance (mostly young people, by the way) — in the middle of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression — John Roberts did Obama’s bidding for him and invoked the T-word with conviction.

The check is in the mail, John?

And by the way, Mr. Roberts, you are the laughingstock now, not Mr. Verrilli. Because in hindsight, Mr. Verrilli was on an intellectual suicide mission designed to argue two diametrically opposed arguments simultaneously, a role which he performed perfectly. What is your excuse? Were you on an intellectual suicide mission?

Third, the mandate + penalty is NOT a tax. The argument completely fails for a simple reason: because the government does not collect the money. That’s right, the mandate forces every citizen to buy insurance from private companies, or pay a penalty. This puts insurance companies in the driver’s seat to screw Americans from sea to shining sea with impunity, which is why insurance company stocks rose after Obamacare was forced through and passed in 2010. Here is a graph of Aetna’s stock price since then:

Barack Obama feeds young, healthy citizens into the jaws of health care companies, whose stock prices can taste the blood.

Does everyone understand this gaping hole in the “tax” argument? That private companies are the recipients of the forced spending, and that as such it can not be called or considered a tax?

A Simple Analogy

Let’s use a simple analogy: There are at least two high-profile companies that aid people in their weight-loss programs, Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers. Can you imagine if the fascist Obama regime forced a law through Congress, using lies and distortion and butchered legislative processes, that required all Americans to join weight loss programs — even those who were skinny and had no need for them. Imagine that the force of the federal government were brought against citizens who refused to buy Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers products and services. Can this forced purchasing from Jenny Craig and Weight Watchers be called a “tax”? Of course not — taxes are paid to governments, not private companies.

For Liberals who want to rush at me and point out that all citizens at some point will need health care, and so my analogy doesn’t work, I will save you the trouble and point out that this difference does not take anything away from the simple fact that the mandate is not a tax. That is, when government taxes, it collects the revenue, and in my analogy, as in Obamacare, it is private companies who are the beneficiaries of the power of the state against citizens.

This is the treachery of Obamacare, and this is the treachery of John Roberts: it is not a tax, and yet, right out of Orwell, they say it is so that the machine can roll over us all.

The Implications

Remember that the mandate + penalty is in Obamacare (and needs to be there) because healthy people who are forced to pay into the system effectively subsidize all of the illegal immigrants and expensive cases who are also covered, and if those healthy people exercise their freedom and elect not to buy health insurance, the numbers don’t work and the socialized medicine scheme fails.

If the implication of this is not clear by now, let me spell it out: insurance companies in the Obamacare era will quickly claim that they are losing money and cannot afford to cover the expensive cases, and seek to make up the shortfall on the backs of those very same healthy people who were forced into buying policies they didn’t want in the first place. This fascist policy will spiral out of control and citizens will be forced to pay increasing premiums with no ability to opt out.

In a free society, the calculation would go like this: once premiums get too expensive — let’s say $1,000 per month, or $12,000 per year — a person can opt out and take the risk of getting sick, which will be expensive, but probably less than $12,000 per year.

But in fascism, in Obamacare as upheld by John Roberts, such a person will be forced to pay $1,000 per month or be fined by the federal government — the IRS no less. And then $1,200 per month. And then $1,500 per month. This poor citizen, who is likely to need maybe $200 of health care services in a year, will be paying $18,000 per year.

What incentive do insurance companies have to keep premiums at reasonable levels? They will say they need $2,000 per month, and then $3,000 per month, as a nation of people with no incentive to stay healthy sucks more and more money out of the system. Where will it end?

Where does fascism always end?

The second question is WHY John Roberts did this. We can only conjecture, but one theory crosses my mind: he may have been the victim of politics played Chicago-style, which is to say that he may have been visited in the dead of night by gun-toting thugs who threatened him and his family if he didn’t vote Obama’s way. Roberts’ opinion in this landmark case is that strange, and that wrong.

I’m interested in hearing other theories, but this one strikes me as quite possible.

America has never been in worse danger, may god help us.

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