The Obamacare Decision

President Obama and the minority of Americans who support Obamacare can take heart that the Supreme Court declined to strike it down today.

That is all they can (or should at least) take heart in.

In denying that Obamacare is permissible under the federal government's Commerce Clause powers, as the administration argued, future expanses of federal power will be, at the very least, made problematic or, at most, headed off altogether. For the first time in decades (since the New Deal really), the Court has rejected Congress' and the President's attempt to sophistically use the Commerce Clause as an empty vessel justifying any and every expanse of the federal government's scope. For future enhancements of the welfare state, something else will be needed to achieve a pretense of constitutionality.

This is a longer-term effect of today's ruling though.

More immediate and more consequential is the finding that the Individual Mandate is justified – and only justified – as a tax pursuant to Congress' taxing and spending powers. Setting aside the constitutional merit of this conclusion, politically it is an endorsement of Obamacare that in all likelihood will be its ultimate demise.

President Obama ran for office promising not to raise taxes. (He also promised a "net spending cut", which the ACA most definitively is not). When Obamacare was being debated he and his surrogates insisted the Individual Mandate was not a tax. Yet the only reason it lives – for now – is as a tax.

Running for reelection then, his signature legislative achievement – already a deeply unpopular expanse of federal power into health-care – has now also been labeled a tax – one of the largest tax increases in American history, no less.

Already struggling to keep even with his opponent and desperate to shift focus away from his record, that much more weight has now been thrown onto the president's back. A deeply unpopular law – the source of the Democratic Party's worst midterm in a century – is now also a massive tax increase. As of today, it is also the paramount issue in this campaign.

Privately the president and his reelection team are all too aware of this. (Conspicuous in his remarks after the decision was a plea that it was now time to "move forward", i.e. to not talk about it anymore.) One cannot help but wonder if, after reading the Chief Justice's opinion, they did not feel much like one of those old Looney Toons characters that has just been handed a gift-wrapped "present" of five sticks of dynamite.

Though it lives past today, after today the likelihood of Obama and Obamacare both being replaced in and immediately after the election are measurably greater.