Democracy or Deception?

Something very important that I did not get to in my earlier post:  Chief Justice Roberts voices in a number of places in the majority opinion that the Supreme Court is not "consder[ing] whether the Act embodies sound policy."  He ends the opinion by stating that “the Court does not express any opinion on the wisdom of the Affordable Care Act” because “[u]nder the Constitution, that judgment is reserved to the people.”

That's fine but it's only fine if something very important is overlooked.   As Paul Mirengoff notes:

The legislature and the executive represented to the public that the mandate is not a tax. Ordinarily, the use of labels is not particularly relevant, and perhaps labels should not carry much weight here. However, when the labels affixed, and the framing used, by the people’s branches clearly are designed to make legislation palatable to the people, it can be argued that deference to democracy does not militate in favor of stretching to reject the labels and the framing through the “fairly possible” test. Here, the president and his fellow Democrats labeled and framed the exaction for not purchasing health insurance as a penalty because taxes are unpopular. 

Of course, the chief justice argued that the individual mandate is a tax, not a penalty as it had been called when it was brought before the American people.

In addition:

If the mandate had been struck down as a penalty, the people’s representatives could then try to enact it as a tax. This remedy would vindicate democracy because the mandate would then be enacted or rejected without the earlier deception, in the form and under the label that is required for it to pass constitutional muster. 

It's seems as though Roberts has taken for granted that what was passed by Congress and what came out of the Supreme Court was in essence the same thing.  It is not.  The arguments the Obama Administration and Democrats in Congress used to convince the American people that the law was needed (and they never really did convince the people in the first place) and what they eventually passed out of Congress is at odds with what the Supreme Court said what the law is.  Written law by definition cannot have two different meanings at the same time.  So in effect, the people, in one way or another, have been deceived.