GOV. ROMNEY: Well, the Supreme Court has the final word and their final word is that Obamacare is a tax. So it’s a tax. They decided it was constitutional. So it is a tax and it’s constitutional. That’s the final word—that’s what it is. Now, I agreed with the dissent. I would have taken a different course, but the dissent wasn’t the majority. The majority has ruled and their rule is final. It is a tax.
But as Paul Mirengoff notes:
The Supreme Court’s mandates are binding — they control what happens going forward — but that doesn’t mean that citizens such as Mitt Romney must agree with the Court’s reasoning or its characterizations.
And Abraham Lincoln would agree more with Paul than with Romney on this question. Here is Lincoln from his Speech on the Dred Scott decision:
We believe, as much as Judge Douglas, (perhaps more) in obedience to, and respect for the judicial department of government. We think its decisions on Constitutional questions, when fully settled, should control, not only the particular cases decided, but the general policy of the country, subject to be disturbed only by amendments of the Constitution as provided in that instrument itself. More than this would be revolution. But we think the Dred Scott decision is erroneous. We know the court that made it, has often over-ruled its own decisions, and we shall do what we can to have it to over-rule this. We offer no resistance to it.
Romney does not have to go the extra mile and assert that whatever the Supreme Court says is the final say on the Constitution. (The Supreme Court was never understood by the Founders to be the final arbiter of the Constitution; that "principle" was established much much later in Cooper v. Aaron in 1958.) Lincoln, Andrew Jackson, and the Founders understood that each branch has the duty to interpret the Constitution as they see it. They also understood that ultimately, the People are truly the final arbiters of the Constitution.
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