something exactly the opposite of what he had told the american people. yeah. there s no two ways about it. a fraud has been perpetrated on the american citizenry. they were promised during the campaign that people making less than $200,000 wouldn t have their taxes increased. president obama, every democratic leader in the house and senate promised them they were not raising taxes in this act. after it was passed they cynically had their lawyers go to court and say it is a tax and, unfortunately, the court aided and abetted that bait and switch on the american public. megyn: what is your take on what we saw from chief justice roberts here? look, chief justice roberts understood that there are very serious limits on the commerce power and that what the congress did in the act was unconstitutional. again, that s the good news. the bad news is for whatever reason, and you ll have to ask justice roberts, he rewrote the statute to turn what was clearly a penalty for an unlawful act int
impose enormous costs on small businesses and will lead them to do one of two things, either never get over 50 employees which means fire some people, or get to 50 employees and pay onerous health insurance, or they may just drop health insurance entirely and pay the penalty. megyn: why would they do that? why would they drop health insurance totally and just pay the penalty? well, i think most people will predict that health insurance premiums under this act are going to skyrocket, and it might be more economically sensible for you rather than paying $12, $13,000 a year in medical insurance, pay a $2,000 penalty and let your poor employees try and fend for themselves. it s not something small business owners want to do, but this is the dilemma that the government s imposed on them. megyn: you argued before these justices that this was an expansion of the commerce clause like we d never seen before and not a constitutional one. you won on that. [laughter] you won the battle, but you
find a way to make sure we have viable health care, affordable health care, effective health care for americans, and now we know that we can, that this is one avenue to get it through the affordable care act. the political process, if people believe we ought to go a different direction, then we should do that. megyn: talk about this commerce clause ruling to the extent the high court said with the majority you cannot expand the commerce clause, and i just want to read the viewers a quote. this is from justice roberts. it s a little long so bear with me. he writes: construing the commerce clause to permit congress to regulate individuals precisely because they re doing nothing would open a new and potentially vast domain to congressional authority. upholding this act under the commerce clause would give congress the same license to regulate what people do not do. they gave power to regulate commerce, not to compel it. well, i agree with the
i m glad he rewrote the statute rather than the constitution, but neither one of those can pass rational scrutiny. megyn: before i let you go, we re going to be joined by douglas holtz-eakin who was formerly of the cbo. they score the bill, they know about medicaid. he s got some opinions on this medicaid piece of the bill, but what are your thoughts? that s one area where those challenging the law won to some extent. what are your thoughts on the import of that piece of the court s ruling? i m pretty much at sea on that, megyn. i didn t want argue that. that involved the states. the net of what the court did today was say they could require you to have this new medicaid expansion, but they couldn t impose the onerous financial penalties on you that the act was going to impose. so i think it s just a purely numbers question for a lot of states. is the penalties for not participating worse than participating and all the expenditures that that requires, and i just don t know the answer