Was there a late-game shift in the thinking of the Supreme Court on their Affordable Care Act ruling? That's certainly the implication from this catch by Brad DeLong. Repeatedly in his opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia refers to Ruth Bader Ginsburg's concurring opinion as a "dissent." An example, which is littered throughout the text:

Our test's premise of regulated activity is not invented out of whole cloth, but rests upon the Constitution's requirement that it be commerce which is regulated. If all inactivity affecting commerce is commerce, commerce is everything. Ultimately the dissent is driven to saying that there is really no difference between action and inaction, ante, at 26, a proposition that has never recommended itself, neither to the law nor to common sense...

As I said, this happens over and over, nine times in the text. Now maybe this is just typical Scalia dismissiveness, but it's also completely plausible that Ginsburg's opinion WAS a dissent at one point, and Scalia's concurring dissent originally the majority opinion.

Dayen quotes David Bernstein:

Back in May, there were rumors floating around relevant legal circles that a key vote was taking place, and that Roberts was feeling tremendous pressure from unidentified circles to vote to uphold the mandate. Did Roberts originally vote to invalidate the mandate on commerce clause grounds, and to invalidate the Medicaid expansion, and then decide later to accept the tax argument and essentially rewrite the Medicaid expansion (which, as I noted, citing Jonathan Cohn, was the sleeper issue in this case) to preserve it? If so, was he responding to the heat from President Obama and others, preemptively threatening to delegitimize the Court if it invalidated the ACA? The dissent, along with the surprising way that Roberts chose to uphold both the mandate and the Medicaid expansion, will inevitably feed the rumor mill.

He is not as many thought a legislator from the bench.

He knows the law stinks but it's not his job to fix it by changing the law.

For whom, specifically?  

Anyone who already has insurance does not pay a 'tax'.

So, I really want to understand, how is this the 'largest tax increase in history"?

The thing I don't understand is why conservatives don't like it. This seems like something that would be right up their alley.

And nothing makes you more smug than getting a rise out of BTD, although there's an element of your trying a little too hard here; too bad that in the process, whatever arguments you think you're making disappear, and all that's left is evidence of the small and shallow person you apparently are.