Las Vegas Review Journal: Health care lies: Now the mandate is a tax

KEY QUOTE: "Either the mandate is a tax, as the Obama Justice Department now asserts in court, and President Barack Obama lied to the American people -- loudly, firmly, repeatedly, as he worked to get this massive federal power grab enacted -- or else Barack Obama was telling the truth last year, the penalty is not a tax, and the Justice Department (directly answerable to the president) is lying in court today when it asserts no one can challenge the mandate because it falls under the wide-ranging "taxing authority" ... that it's a tax."

EDITORIAL: Health care lies
Now the mandate is a tax
Las Vegas Review Journal
July 23, 2010

Under ObamaCare, most Americans will have to maintain "minimum essential" health care coverage starting in 2014.

But while Congress was working on the health care legislation, Mr. Obama refused to accept the argument that a mandate to buy insurance, enforced by financial penalties, was equivalent to a tax. "I absolutely reject that notion," he said emphatically.

Why? Because Mr. Obama was loathe to admit he'd massively violated his campaign pledge not to raise taxes on anyone but the rich, presumably.

In keeping with that approach, even though Congress anticipated a constitutional challenge to the bill and listed in the legislation 10 detailed arguments seeking to show a delegated power to extend the individual mandate, at no point did the drafters cite the taxing power as a source of authority for what they were doing.

Yet The New York Times reported July 16 that, "The Obama administration and its allies now defend the requirement as an exercise of the government's 'power to lay and collect taxes.' Administration officials say the tax argument is a linchpin of their legal case in defense of the health care overhaul and its individual mandate, now being challenged in court by more than 20 states and several private organizations."

In a brief defending the law, the Justice Department says the requirement for people to carry insurance or pay the penalty is "a valid exercise" of Congress's power "to impose taxes." For more than a century, it adds, the Supreme Court has held Congress can tax even activities that it could not reach by using its power to regulate commerce.

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