[Pretzel Logic]

Here's a place for people to post their thoughts, and exchange ideas/arguments on the subject.

Please understand that Deep Wave Analytics will not be held responsible for any emotional trauma you may experience if/when arguing with your peers.

[Nostradumass]

Play nice everybody. Like PL said, arguing with your peers can get you off your game...and nobody wants that.

[Shiver Metimbers]

My goodness, what an excellent topic that no one ever addressed.

Fruitful subtopics I see include:

1. Constitutionality


A. US Law prohibits the federal courts from considering any tax bill until after the tax has gone into effect. The question of the constitutionality of the ACA arose on several grounds, most notably Fedzilla mandating that every person, because they are alive, must buy a product that Fedzilla approves, or pay a penalty. (No jail time was in the ACA itself, but the HHS Secretary was granted enormous discretionary powers... The Administrative State can do such things, has before.)

Therefore some discussion of the flim-flammery of the Court is in order: accepting for purposes of review that, as Congress intentionally worded it, the individual must "pay a penalty" (many tried to get the word tax put there, and were defeated) for not buying a government-mandated and -approved health insurance plan, yet for purposes of determining constitutionality of the provision, the "penalty" was deemed a "tax," specifically ignoring the explicit intent of Congress. The Opinion now has force of law, and all the penalties are now, under Law by Decree, required to be called "taxes."

Quite against longstanding standards of judicial practice, that.


B. Taking Robert's majority opinion as Law, there is NO LIMIT OF ANY KIND on the amount or kind of taxation Fedzilla may assess. Bit of a departure from the past, that. No prior Court had ever agreed with Brutus, see topic c below. The history of the Supreme Court, how it came to take greater and greater power to itself, including the then-novel idea of Judicial Review and later Writing Law by Legal Opinion, aka Law by Decree... all of that is worthy of exploration.


C. The debate should be had now that was never held during the Convention that wrote the Constitution (betraying their charge to amend the Articles of Confederation, for which reason a number of delegates left and condemned it), nor answered honestly by Publius (pseudonym of Hamilton and Madison) in the Federalist papers, regarding the "enumerated powers" clauses.

Brutus, pseudonym of Judge Yates, one of the delegates to the convention and a staunch opponent of the document creating the new Federal Government, pointed out that the actual wording of Article I, Section 8 in fact placed no limits on the central government, and the list of "enumerated powers" was no more than a feint. In particular, he was quite concerned by the taxation clause(s), and railed in Brutus #5 (bold emphases mine):

Under this clause may be imposed a poll-tax, a land-tax, a tax on houses and buildings, on windows and fire places, on cattle and on all kinds of personal property: — It extends to duties on all kinds of goods to any amount, to tonnage and poundage on vessels, to duties on written instruments, newspapers, almanacks, and books: — It comprehends an excise on all kinds of liquors, spirits, wines, cyder, beer, etc. and indeed takes in duty or excise on every necessary or conveniency of life; whether of foreign or home growth or manufactory. In short, we can have no conception of any way in which a government can raise money from the people, but what is included in one or other of three general terms. We may say then that this clause commits to the hands of the general legislature every conceivable source of revenue within the United States. Not only are these terms very comprehensive, and extend to a vast number of objects, but the power to lay and collect has great latitude; it will lead to the passing a vast number of laws, which may affect the personal rights of the citizens of the states, expose their property to fines and confiscation, and put their lives in jeopardy: it opens a door to the appointment of a swarm of revenue and excise officers to pray [sic] upon the honest and industrious part of the community, eat up their substance, and riot on the spoils of the country.

Like all the other excellent objections Brutus raised in his various Letters, Publius pooh-poohed this one, claiming that the Federal Government's powers were clearly enumerated and limited. Hamilton knew this to be false, and lied; Madison actually believed it, for a while. He later tried with partial success to get people to "interpret the Constitution correctly" even after being confronted with the evidence of Hamilton's Whisky Tax of 1791 (that Act alone is worth a thread, but not here) and later "unconstitutional" aggregations of power by the Court, the Congress and the Executive.

Fact is, words matter, and the wording used by Hamilton's Committee for Style (which wrote the actual Constitution) was used with purpose, and allows far greater (now infinite) scope to Fedzilla than Madison or the general public ever envisioned.

With Robert's Ruling, Hamilton's Dream has come to its full expression.


2. What this ruling says about the Roberts Court, and what that harbinges for the future - this topic is even more relevant in 2019 than in 2012, given the death of Scalia.


3. What, if anything, can or should be done about the "despotism of an oligarchy" as Thomas Jefferson so colorfully referred to the power-aggrandizing Judiciary.