On November 8, Representative Trent Franks (R-AZ) and thirty-nine other Republican members of the House of Representatives filed a "friend of the court" brief in support of a legal challenge to the Affordable Care Act ("Obamacare") based on the Origination Clause that will be heard by the District of Columbia Federal Court of Appeals in early 2014.

The case, Sissel v United States Department of Health and Human Services, was filed in the Washington, D.C. District Federal Court by the Pacific Legal Foundation on behalf of Matt Sissel, an Iraq war veteran who lives in Iowa, where he owns a small business, on July 26, 2010.

The Origination Clause of the Constitution, Article 1, Section 7, Clause 1 states "All Bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills." Not a word of the Affordable Care Act originated in the House of Representatives. Instead, using a legislative trick, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) took an innocuous bill that had passed the House unanimously on October 8, 2009 by a 416-0 vote, the Service Members Home Ownership Tax Act of 2009, removed every word of its text following the first sentence, and replaced it with the Affordable Care Act language.

On June 28, 2013, Judge Beryl Hoffman, an Obama appointee, ruled against Sissel, dismissing his complaint using reasoning that required a rejection of Chief Justice John Roberts' controversial and even ridiculed majority opinion in the Supreme Court's 5-4 decision in the 2012 NFIB v Sebelius case. In that opinion, Roberts declared Obamacare constitutional based upon his opinion that the law's individual mandate was, in fact, a tax.

Judge Hoffman ruled that the type of revenue raised by the act that Justice John Roberts deemed to be a tax was not the type of revenue that constituted a tax under the Origination Clause.

http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/...amacare-Do-Over

I have contended from the very day of the SC ruling, that Justice Roberts hid the seeds for dismantling Obamacare within his ruling.

Zitat

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"While some kinds of taxes have been held not to be 'bills for raising revenue' and not subject to the Origination Clause, this is only where the tax is really just a penalty or a fine used to enforce compliance with some other constitutionally valid law," he stated."Such logic," he concluded, "doesn’t apply to the individual mandate, because the Supreme Court itself, in its Obamacare ruling last year, explicitly denied that the individual mandate is a 'penalty.' Therefore it must be a ‘bill for raising revenue’ subject to the Origination Clause."

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That's how I understood Roberts ruling. Still wish he ruled differently though.