The Obamites’ shameless lies

Law professor Jack Balkin argues that the individual mandate is constitutional after all, because it is a tax. He writes:

The individual mandate, which amends the Internal Revenue Code, is not actually a mandate at all. It is a tax. It gives people a choice: they can buy health insurance or they can pay a tax roughly equal to the cost of health insurance, which is used to subsidize the government’s health care program and families who wish to purchase health insurance….

The Constitution gives Congress the power to tax and spend money for the general welfare. This tax promotes the general welfare because it makes health care more widely available and affordable. Under existing law, therefore, the tax is clearly constitutional.

Isn’t this absurd on its face? The purpose of the mandate is not to raise taxes; it’s to force people to purchase health insurance. And the fine that one pays for not purchasing health insurance is not a tax, it’s a penalty for violating the mandate to purchase insurance.

A commenter at Ann Althouse’s blog, where Balkin’s case for the mandate is being discussed, writes:

Maybe I’m alone here, but I sure do wish we had some less intelligent people running things. People not so prone to proving how intelligent they are by twisting language and logic into six-dimensional pretzels to justify their shi**ing all over the constitution.

Amen.

Leftists lie, shamelessly. They violate the truth with the same cold determination and the same abandon with which a career criminal violates the law.

Ann Althouse has an interesting response to Balkin’s argument:

But will the Obama administration want to defend the mandate this way? Millions of Americans are getting a big new tax hit? It’s not just a question of whether this argument will work in court. It’s a question of whether Obama wants to shout out loud that the supposedly beneficent new law is a huge new tax on the very people he assured—over and over—that he would not raise taxes on.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 30, 2010 08:25 AM | Send