Now, was that so hard? Don’t be afraid to ask, we are here to help!
Dedicated to fighting your ignorance.
Very reassuring. When do you plan to start?
I hope you enjoy your new life in Somalia.
Bet you think that response is witty.
And this just in, from your good friends over at Daily Kos:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/1...er?detail=hide
Far too much to encapsulate, you pretty much have to read it, and follow the embedded links for citation. TL:DR Not totally fixed, but much, much better.
I would read it, since your scintillating summary is so intriguing, unfortunately the link appears broken.
It was an attempt to see how deeply you understand and mean what you say on that topic. I think we have our answer.
This is a test, I have nothing further to add, but gotta post it to see if it works.
Not really. The Supreme Court did hold that the ACA was not supported by the Commerce Clause but as a tax. I think that will prove interesting when different enforcement mechanisms are needed in the future. When it becomes punitive and no longer a simple tax, expect a new round of lawsuits.
So, we should expect some resistance, because some people will do whatever it takes to kill this thing? Thanks for the warning.
I was asking our friend why he’s opposed to health care being a federal bailiwick but he’s fine with the states doing it. “US constitution” was his only reply, implying he’s a states-righter.
A better term than “punitive” might be “coercive” - you will do this or face the consequences. There’s plenty of precedent for that in legislation, because that’s how most of it works. If the hook that noncompliance means something one can, with contortions, call a “tax” hadn’t been in there, then the teabaggers and the party-before-country wing of SCOTUS wouldn’t have had an anti-Obama case at all.
Yes, but most federal legislation (according to the Court) complies with the interstate commerce clause. The Supreme Court has held that the ACA does not and survives solely because the penalties it purports to impose are so slight that they are a tax.
Imagine for the sake of the hypo that the ACA has a deficiency where people are better off paying the “tax” that buying into it. The system starts to implode. To save the system, Congress proposes increased penalties/taxes to offset the deficiency.
Aha! No longer such a slight penalty as to be called a tax. It was increased. It is now a penalty! Back up the ladder we go.
But that is already baked into the law-- the penalty goes up dramatically in the coming years. Why didn’t the court already take that into account?
I am no lawyer, but isn’t it true that you can’t sue over a tax until you’ve been afflicted by it?
Yes. But the Supreme Court held that for the purposes of the anti-injunction act (which creates the rule you state), the mandate is not a tax. 
Jtgain is making the claim, which I’m asking him to explain, that the court finding is dependent on the mandate being “small”. I didn’t see that in the decision, and I’m wondering what he is talking about.
The determination of whether something is a tax for constitutional law purposes is a functional analysis, and one of the factors is how burdensome the assessment is. The more burdensome, the more it looks like a penalty and not a tax.
But my point was that we already know how burdensome it will be in future years, so didn’t the court already take that into account when making its decision?
Now, if a future Congress makes significant changes to the [del]penalty[/del] tax, then maybe another case brought before the court?
Yes and yes, respectively. I think the second sentence was jtgain’s point.