Justice Roberts did not begin the destruction of America and he certainly won’t be the last person to contribute, but there can be no doubt that he put a nail in the coffin today.
You don’t have to be a constitutional lawyer to understand the hypocrisy of his ruling. All you need is a little common sense.
How can it be unconstitutional to order me to buy something and at the same time be constitutional to tax (penalize) me for not buying it?
The lawyers and politicians will want to get you hung up on some technical or legal distinction between a tax and a fine. That is not the issue.
Justice Roberts recognized that forcing me to buy health insurance was beyond the almost unlimited powers of the commerce clause. He recognizes that the purpose of the constitution is to place at least some limits on the Federal Government.
In the same ruling he “gave” the Federal Government unlimited power to do anything it wants through the process of taxation.
This is the great hypocrisy. The government can now tax me if I don’t buy the food they think I should eat or drive the car they think I should drive.
They can disguise almost anything as a tax. If I live in a county that doesn’t vote the way they want me to vote they can find some characteristic of that county that enables them to tax the residents. Perhaps we own to many SUV’s or have too many old people or too few illegal aliens. Perhaps we own too many guns or have a Nascar track. Perhaps we grow tobacco, mine coal or have a higher percentage of wetland property. Perhaps we have too many single family homes and too few apartments. Perhaps our local college has too few foreign students.
The point is that the government has an ever greater and more restrictive role in our lives that is counter to a free society.
Today it got more power in a far greater way than it has in recent times.