John Roberts' Flawed Obamacare Decision

Writing at National Review, George Mason University law professor Eric R. Claeys takes aim at Chief John Roberts' majority opinion upholding the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act's individual mandate, which Roberts ruled to be an exercise of Congress' tax powers:

To justify the mandate as a tax, Roberts made two major legal errors. First, he misread § 5000A when he classified it as a tax, and not a regulatory "requirement" backed up by a "penalty." This misinterpretation was deliberate. Roberts expressly refused to say whether the tax reading was the "most natural interpretation" of § 5000A; he only said that the tax reading was "fairly possible." Roberts applied such a weak interpretation of § 5000A because he wanted to avoid striking down the mandate if he could. Here, however, Roberts did not live up to a promise he had made during his confirmation hearings: to decide cases like an umpire. A good umpire would not apply one strike zone for batters from a small-market team and another for the New York Yankees. By the same token, the constitutional "judicial power" isn't exercised as it ought to be when a judge departs from ordinary principles of statutory interpretation in order to conserve powers that the U.S. government has claimed for itself.

As for what opponents of the health care law should do next, Claeys has this to say:

Constitutionalists — partisans of limited, constitutional government — now face a critical decision: Should they acquiesce in the Sebelius decision and move on to campaign against Obamacare exclusively on policy grounds? Or should they continue to make constitutional criticisms of Obamacare — and broaden those charges by making the Sebelius decision part of their indictment? Definitely the latter.

Read the whole thing here.