The Supreme Court has upheld the very large majority of the health care bill. In particular, it upheld the individual mandate 5-4 (with Roberts, without Kennedy) on the grounds that it is a tax — having rejected it as a valid application of the Commerce Clause.
But for purposes of the anti-Injunction Act (always my favorite grounds for decision, but pretty clearly not a winner after its reception below not to mention the oral argument and the Administration’s attempt to disclaim the argument), the individual mandate is not a tax.
That sounds odd. But the opinions are long, and I need to read them to see how that happened.
Update: The answer seems to be statutory interpretation — Congress gets to say when things (tax or not) are covered by the anti-injunction act, and the five Justices in the majority don’t see Congress as intending that result here given the choice of the word “penalty” for the mandate’s fines while “tax” was used elsewhere. The principle asserted is that for Constitutional purposes the Court must look through Congressional labels to see what things really are, but that for statutory interpretation involving the interplay of different statutes, in principle Congress gets to call things whatever it likes and here the Court is reading in the not-a-tax-for-anti-injunction-purposes meaning from the statutory word choices.
