If you say so about my reckless allegations, but I disagree about the "tax." It's not a matter of semantics because the Constitution has very specific instructions about taxes. You do have a good point that since the law assigned collection to the IRS suggests it's a tax in practical terms. I always believed that was because the mechanism was already in place to collect money from citizens.
What I said still stands: Nobody on either side made the case it's a tax, in fact the Obama Administration was very specific about not making that case, yet Roberts created the argument on the fly to justify the decision, and by all appearances, all by himself. Now, I am nowhere near a legal eagle, so if you are I expect to be shot to pieces, but this looks a lot like backfilling fudged data to support a preconceived conclusion.
Roberts didn't make something up out of whole cloth and judges are not confined to only those legal conclusions urged by the parties. If the item in question fit the description of a tax sufficiently well in his professional opinion based on logic and available precedent, then it doesn't matter a hill of beans that nobody argued to the Court that it was a tax.
And it is the case that the effects of an action by government carry more weight than the label given to that action in deciding whether it's a tax. There is caselaw holding that a fee for police and fire services - a charge by a local government that was not labeled a "tax" - was a tax, and not a fee for services because the payment was compulsory - i.e., a levy - and was due without regard to whether the payer ever used those services. Thus, simply calling it a service fee does not mean that it is not a tax.
The so-called individual responsibility part of Obastardcare fit the criteria for being a tax, and the holding that it was a tax was not unreasonable or unjustified, despite the fact that it wasn't a "tax" eo nomine and despite the fact that neither party argued for or against its being a tax.
