“Chief Justice Roberts Is A Genius”-Commentary!
Summary of eRumor:
This a forwarded email with an article that says owing to his decision on the Constitutionality of the Affordable Healthcare Act or the law known as “Obamacare”, that Chief Justice John Roberts is a genius.
The Truth:
This is a political opinion that was written on June 28, 2012 and posted on the conservative commentary web site, I.M. Citizen. Click for article.
Nine Supreme Court Justices heard arguments in the form of four questions inquiring if the Affordable Healthcare law is Constitutional. We found an article that explained it “In Plain English,” in a June 28, 2012 article found on the Supreme Court of the United States Blog.
The article said that the primary question was if it was legal for Congress to require that Americans purchase health insurance by 2014 or be penalized. It said that “the government’s primary argument was that Congress can require everyone to buy health insurance using its power under the Commerce Clause of the Constitution, because the failure to buy insurance shifts the costs of health care for the uninsured to health care providers, insurance companies, and everyone who does have health insurance.” The article went on to say that five Justices, Chief Justice Roberts along with Justices Kennedy, Scalia, Thomas, and Alito, “all rejected that argument. But the government still won, because a different set of five Justices – the Chief Justice, and Justices Ginsburg, Breyer, Sotomayor, and Kagan – agreed that the mandate was constitutional, but for a different reason.” That being the power of Congress “to regulate commerce assumes that there is commercial activity to regulate and in the view of Chief Justice Roberts “the mandate creates activity, rather than regulating it.”
The article continued to say that Chief Justice Roberts did reject the government’s Commerce Clause argument but “agreed with one of the government’s alternative arguments: the mandate imposes a tax on people who do not buy health insurance, and that tax is something that Congress can impose using its constitutional taxing power. He acknowledged that the mandate (and its accompanying penalty) is primarily intended to get people to buy insurance, rather than to raise money, but it is, he explained, still a tax. If someone who does not want to buy health insurance is willing to pay the tax, that’s the end of the matter; the government cannot do anything else.”
Denying the Court’s claim of a tax, White House Press Secretary Jay Carney told reporters in a briefing the following day that the fine is still just a penalty. In a July 2, 2012 Fox News article GOP Presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s campaign was quick to toss a challenge to President Obama to make a decision to either call this “an unconstitutional penalty or a ‘constitutional tax,’ but not both.”
While promoting the Affordable Healthcare Law, President Obama said that the individual mandate is not a tax.
http://www.youtube.com/embed/bg-ofjXrXio
The genius status of Justice John Roberts might be settled by the results of the November 2012 Presidential election.
update 7/3/12