by Adam Wolf, Director of US Operations – Global Wealth Protection
Did Justice Roberts Have an Ulterior Motive with ObamaCare?
“Members of this Court are vested with the authority to interpret the law; we possess neither the expertise nor the prerogative to make policy judgments. Those decisions are entrusted to our nation’s elected leaders, who can be thrown out of office if the people disagree with them. It is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.”
— Chief Justice John Roberts in the majority opinion in National Federation of Independent Business et al. v. Sebelius et al.
At great risk to my personal safety and to the possibility of driving away legions of angry Global Wealth Protection subscribers, I am going to lay out a case that the recent Supreme Court decision to uphold ObamaCare was actually a gold-plated gift handed to Conservatives on a silver platter by Chief Justice Roberts leading up to the November elections.
Before you simply delete this email and remove your address from our mailing list, please hear me out, for I believe we will look back on June 28, 2012 as the most important day in the struggle for an America free from the grip of Czar Obama.
First, it is important to keep in mind that Supreme Court appointments are lifetime tenure. Chief Justice Roberts is going to preside over the Court for a long, long time. Since that is the case, Supreme Court Justices in general take a more macro view on cases before them, while many Americans tend to get tunnel-vision and only think in terms of the next election cycle which is often measured in two-year increments.
I mention this because I think there is both a short-term implication to the SCOTUS decision, as well as a long-term implication, and I believe Chief Justice Roberts wrote the opinion with both implications in mind, while codifying the Republican’s ability to unravel ObamaCare with legislative remedies.
Let’s quickly jump into the way-back machine and remember what happened leading up to the 2010 mid-terms that swept Republicans into power in state houses and governors mansions all across the fruited plain, as well as in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Why was there such an enormous groundswell of support for Republicans and Tea Party Conservatives? What caused conservative voters to turn out in such droves, hell-bent on defeating the democrats? It was because ObamaCare was crammed down our throats to begin with, remember? Sure there were the bailouts, quantitative easing, Cash for Clunkers, and other fascist policies, but ObamaCare was an enormous motivator for the Right.
Paraphrasing what the national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post Gazetter, Jack Kelly, said of the SCOTUS ruling in a letter to some friends, the Democrats would like nothing more than for ObamaCare to just go away as an issue in the minds of voters. Heck, even after the last week’s decision that has supposedly given the Left a victory, democrats in swing states, like Claire McCaskill in Missouri, have gone into hiding. Former Pennsylvania Governor, Ed Rendell, described it as “an albatross around our necks.”
Now, thanks to Chief Justice Roberts, it’s back, front and center, and it will be the rallying cry for the GOP for the next four months. As my friend Paul Sparacino brilliantly predicts, “this issue is going to dominate the news cycles, the pundit analysis, and the political speeches from now until November. It’s going to motivate and mobilize the Tea Party back to the front lines, and it’s going to bring in money for the Romney campaign.”
But, and this is a BIG BUT (no offense to Michelle Obama), ObamaCare is not just back in the news as a heavy-handed, misguided, fascist government policy, but it’s back, first and foremost, as a tax, and I believe that this is the most important aspect of the Supreme Court ruling!
Paraphrasing Jack Kelly again, in the misguided euphoria on the Left, liberals fail to realize how deadly the SCOTUS decision to uphold ObamaCare on the basis of the legislature’s ability to tax is to the future of the law. In the majority opinion, Roberts went out of his way to say, in effect, it doesn’t matter what the Obama Administration, David Axelrod, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, or any of the other nattering nags on the Left say, the consequence of not complying with the individual mandate is to be taxed.
In the eyes of the Supreme Court, ObamaCare is a tax. Period. Forever and ever, amen.
ObamaCare is not just any tax, however, it’s the largest tax increase in U.S. history, $400 BILLION worth to be more accurate…and most Americans, hate tax increases. Mix in this colossal tax hike when actual unemployment is running around 15% , U.S. manufacturing is slowing down , and 10-year treasury yields are bouncing around a 200-year low , and this could be political suicide for Obama and the democrats in November.
Paul Rahe over at Ricochet.com said the SCOTUS ruling was a “cunning decision,” and I couldn’t agree more.
Just think what would have happened had the Roberts court overturned ObamaCare. I completely agree with Chris Stirewalt at FoxNews.com when he describes how the Left would have crafted their message, to be repeated ad nauseum by the mainstream media, all the way to election day: “Unelected judges, appointed by Republicans, have just ripped health coverage and patient protections away from millions of deserving Americans. Greedy Republicans want to plunder the middle class and Obama is going to fight to keep them from doing it to any more of your rights.”
Instead, as Clarice Feldman at the American Thinker tells us,“Every Democrat running in November will be forced to defend what amounts to the biggest tax increase-about $400 billion dollars-in American history, a tax largely levied against the young and the middle class who don’t normally carry health insurance.”
Aside from the obvious difficulty of running on a tax-hike platform in the middle of a difficult economy, President Obama will also be at great pains to shepherd his legislative flock through the gauntlet of bicameral procedures over which the Republicans now have the upper hand since the Supreme Court has said that ObamaCare is a tax. As Jack Kelly reminded a few of us in his letter, “By declaring Obamacare a tax, Roberts guaranteed that it could be altered or abolished through the reconciliation process, where filibusters don’t apply. Just 51 votes in the Senate are all that is required to get rid of it.”
Let us re-read the opening quote in this column from Chief Justice Roberts taken directly from the majority opinion.
“Members of this Court are vested with the authority to interpret the law; we possess neither the expertise nor the prerogative to make policy judgments. Those decisions are entrusted to our nation’s elected leaders, who can be thrown out of office if the people disagree with them. It is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.”
Elsewhere in the summary, Roberts also wrote, “The Framers created a Federal Government of limited powers, and assigned to this Court the duty of enforcing those limits. The Court does so today. But the Court does not express any opinion on the wisdom of the Affordable Care Act. Under the Constitution, that judgment is reserved to the people.”
Channeling the Chief Justice, Paul Sparacino translates the majority opinion for us: We can’t strike down a law just because it’s a steaming pile of legislative feces. We can only strike down a law if it’s unconstitutional, and we have gone out of our way to narrowly interpret the Constitution to find that ObamaCare can only stand based on Congress’ ability to write laws that manipulate the tax code in order to promote specific behavior. If you don’t like the law that Congress wrote, vote the fuckers out in favor of representatives that will write laws you do like!
The Supreme Court, with Chief Justice Roberts writing the “cunning” opinion, has just issued a triple dog dare to GOP, Tea Party, and Conservative voters and effectively told them precisely how it is possible to get rid of ObamaCare: Vote Republican in November.
I guess we’ll wait and see if GOP voters are smart enough to hear what Chief Justice Roberts is telling them.
I look forward, I think, to hearing from you.
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