Obama to public: ACA not a tax increase; Obama in court: ACA's a tax increase
Now this is a great trick. Publicly, President Obama and his allies claimed, promised and assured the American people that the individual mandate contained in the Affordable Care Act wasn't a tax increase.
Anyone remember this?
Once the constitutionality of ACA was challenged, however, they immediately claimed the individual mandate was constitutional, because it is - voila! - a tax increase, not a penalty.
And ultimately, that's the tortured logic Chief Justice Roberts used to rewrite the law and rule Obamacare constitutional.
Ed Whelan makes a similar point over at Bench Memos:
The Obama administration got away with its bait-and-switch, first denying that the penalty for non-compliance with the mandate was a tax (and winning more favorable scoring from the Congressional Budget Office in the process), then salvaging the mandate-with-penalty on the ground that it could be reconceived as a tax. Any "tax," of course, is a tax on being uninsured - not, I would suspect, a tax that will suddenly win a lot of favor among the American people.Just another example of how liberals will tell the American people one thing and then claim the exact opposite in court.
