From Matt Barber:
Legal scholars will be dissecting this bizarre decision [regarding Obamacare] for decades to come. Still, what I’m more interested in, at least for now, is how the ruling will affect the 2012 elections.
Under any objective analysis, it’s a boon for Mitt Romney and the GOP. Most damaging to Obama and Democrats, perhaps, is the fact that Obamacare’s individual mandate was held to be a “tax” rather than a “penalty.”
Recall that, while Democrats were using parliamentary sleight-of-hand to ram Obamacare through on Christmas Eve, 2009, they expressly wrote into the bill that fines associated with an individual’s failure to fork over the bucks amounted to a penalty, not a tax.
