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Notes -
But even then they didn't really argue that it was a tax. The Obama administration argued that the penalty--and they definitely continued at that point to call it a penalty--was constitutional. There is an attenuated sense in which they claimed it was a "tax" at this point, in that they made an argument in the alternative that even if the penalty was otherwise inappropriate, it was permissible under Congress' taxation powers. That's the (stupid) argument Roberts seized on in seeking to preserve Obamacare, but until his decision came out, the "it's a tax" argument was widely regarded as pretextual at best. When I said that "essentially no one" thought of it as a tax, I don't mean "literally nobody floated this argument ever," I mean I was up to my eyeballs in debates (mostly with other lawyers) about this issue at the time and I just never encountered a serious and well-developed claim that the question turned on "it's a tax." This was surely in part because opponents wanted Obamacare to fail entirely, and proponents (like Obama himself) had very vocally insisted that it's not a tax.
But this is all a weirdly autistic tangent anyway, given that even if I just had a wildly idiosyncratic experience at the time, and you are totally correct that there was some substantial contingent of people who believed the penalty was a tax all along--then my warning about the weird directions SCOTUS might take the Minnesota case is all the more true.
Again I'm gonna have to differ here, and I think the Stephanopoulos interview bears me out. George brought out a dictionary and Obama handwaved away the meaning of "tax", for gosh sake.
What question, precisely? "Can Congress make people pay this" or "Is a penalty for inaction constitutional"? Because, if it's the latter, your lawyer friends missed the forest for the trees, I'd say.
You know, I seem to be called/implied to be autistic fairly frequently online. Maybe I should get checked or something. Is there a test? To me, if it was important enough for you to use as a point in your post, it's important enough to warrant accuracy, or further exploration if needed. If we retcon the shit out of history, we can't learn much from it.
I spent this whole thread writing primarily as someone who was an insurance-premium-paying adult and licensed attorney throughout Obama's presidency. I was giving you my first-hand testimony about how these things were being discussed at the time by the bulk of the informed people I knew. I don't remember having seen the Stephanopoulos interview at that time. Of course, there are always a lot of people talking about things, and not everything gets recorded. Memories are fickle, but "the record" has its own shortcomings, too. The interview you shared does seem to back me up, though--Obama himself was saying "not a tax," his administration argued "not a tax... unless..." and his opponents argued "not a tax." To say that, because an insignificant number of people were saying "yes it is a tax," it was a tax all along--that's the retcon.
Oddly enough, I was just talking with some people about this.
I tried that fest and got a 49, pretty well below the bar. I got some points for not using a lot of movie or television quotes in my daily conversation, which I found odd. An online test at Clinical Partners was also pretty sure I'm not autistic. I wonder if it's simply my online persona: I do tend to care about details.
To me, though, details matter: in this case, the detail that
1, Yes, plenty of people claimed it was a tax from the get-go, and
B. Democrats swore up one wall and down the other it wasn't, and the President, ridiculed people for "making up words", then when shown the word in the dictionary ridiculed more instead of addressing the argument.
It was signature, huge legislation passed while wilfully deceiving the American public. I don't see it as an "autistic" or irrelevant detail at all.
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