Some on the right are latching onto one bit of doctrine as cause for unhappiness in the case. In particular, they claim that John Roberts expanded the government’s taxing power substantially, such that it now provides an endless capacity that Congress lacked with the commerce clause.

This is nonsense. There are two reasons why. First, all nine justices, and even some of the lawyers arguing against the health care law, agreed that the individual mandate could be enforced under the power to tax. Here’s the joint dissent: “Of course in many cases, what was a regulatory mandate enforced by a penalty could have been imposed as a tax upon permissible action, or what was imposed as a tax upon permissible action could have been a regulatory mandate enforced by a penalty. . . . The issue [here] is not whether Congress had the power to frame the minimum-coverage provision as a tax, but whether it did so.” …

Second, that Congress would have the power to pass the mandate pursuant to its power to tax makes eminent sense. John Yoo wrote in last week’s Wall Street Journal: “Congress may not be able to directly force us to buy electric cars, eat organic kale, or replace oil heaters with solar panels. But if it enforces the mandates with a financial penalty, then suddenly, thanks to Justice Roberts’s tortured reasoning in Sebelius, the mandate is transformed into a constitutional exercise of Congress’s power to tax.”