So, the Supreme Court upheld the Affordable Care Act and the individual mandate.  You can read all sorts of puffery and journoanalysis about the decision but the crux of the thing is actually really, really simple to anyone who’s taken a class in constitutional law.

1.  Congress has nearly limitless authority via their broad taxing powers under the Constitution to impose all sorts of various taxes, fees, levies, duties or anything else that has the basic effect of getting money out of people in a similar way.  No constitutional scholar of any credibility would dispute this.

2.  Even though the Democrats in Congress (and the Obama administration in front of the Supreme Court) completely pussied out (because they are always scared of the word “tax”) and didn’t explicitly justify the law under the taxing power, the Supreme Court unquestionably has the ability to rule on the validity of a law based on any valid constitutional theory they want to (sua sponte).  Nobody except partisan dickjobs (e.g., Justices Scalia and Thomas) would think of disputing this either.

3.  The majority of the Court that upheld ACA basically said what I just said in points 1 and 2.  Not only that, Chief Justice Roberts nearly almost went so far as to explicitly call out the other conservative justices (Scalia, Thomas, etc.) as shameless partisan hacks:

In a section of his opinion joined by the liberal justices, Roberts noted that the conservative dissenters contend that the mandate cannot be upheld as a tax “because Congress did not ‘frame’ it as such. In effect, they contend that even if the Constitution permits Congress to do exactly what we interpret this statute to do, the law must be struck down because Congress used the wrong labels.”

So, we can all now be perfectly comfortable calling the conservative assholes in the minority on this decision shameless partisan political hacks because their fearless leader basically did the job for us (well, maybe Kennedy gets off the hook but only because his decisions are rumored to sometimes be based on whether his metamucil was up to par on a particular day).