Insightful look at this decision. Lee's father appeared before the Supreme Court and the author has been sitting in the gallery at the Court since he was ten years old. His analysis is straightforward and begins right away in the first chapter. He uses the introductory trope of telling you something about Chief Justice Roberts that would make you think he is a good jurist, and then Lee tells why Roberts did not live up to his reputation with this particular decision.

The problem is that the majority decision penned by Roberts in the National Federation of Independent Businesses versus Secretary Sibelius (known as NFIB for short) changes the ACA (Obamacare) law in order to save it. The individual mandate that is part of the law cannot stand constitutional muster as regulation, so it was changed by the Courts opinion to a tax, even though Congress expressly recoiled from making it a tax. (Yet the Court's decision assumes, on who-knows-what basis, that Congress would want the Court to change the mandate to a tax.)

The decision also says that the part of the law that requires all states to expand Medicaid or face penalties is unconstitutional. So states can now opt out of Medicaid expansion without losing Medicaid under the previous agreement with the federal government.

Lee points out that supporters of Obamacare should be upset with the Court's decision especially with the last change in the law that I mentioned. If states can opt out of Medicaid expansion, then Obamacare will likely collapse without the participation of all the states. But this change is also unfair, Lee notes, because it means that citizens of states that don't expand Medicaid will have to pay for Medicaid expansion in the states that do.

Lee's main criticism, however, is that this decision puts the Court in the position of literally making laws when the Constitution prescribes that only Congress shall make federal laws and the Supreme Court will only give those laws thumbs up or down, not rewrite the laws.

Lee suggests a remedy short of repealing Obamacare or persuading the Court to overrule its own decision: Senate Bill 506, proposed by Lee, would rewrite the law to strengthen the point that the individual mandate is not a tax. This is, he admits, a clever trick because a vote on this bill would force members of the Senate to take a stand on whether they are OK with the Supreme Court changing the mandate to a tax. If they are, they are on record as raising taxes; if they are not, their vote will force the Court to declare the mandate unconstitutional in any subsequent case involving the law, which would stab (my word, not his) Obamacare in the heart.

I am personally troubled by Obamacare and its impact on my own life and on the proper relationship of government to the citizen and the various state governments. So I read this book with a sense of disappointment that Justice Roberts would decide a case in such a strange and harmful way. Lee speculates on whether it is true, as some have claimed, that Roberts considered public opinion or, worse, media opinion (which is not representative of the people) in making his decision, and even changed his mind from voting against the ACA to voting to save it. Aside from being able to cite those who claim they are certain this happened, Lee says he personally does not know. He concludes that whatever the motivation for his error, Justice Roberts made a very bad error. If he wanted to help the Court's reputation, he may have hurt it instead; if he wanted to strengthen the constitutional roles of the Congress and the Court, he failed at that, too. What if from now on Congress feels no qualm about writing bad laws? "The Supreme Court will fix them, if we make them badly." ( )