Romney deems Obama a liar ex post facto

I have long marveled at the verbal contortions Romney must go through to a) justify current GOP nonsense positions and b) align his own prior pronouncements and actions with current nonsense.  Often this Operation Twist further involves c) differentiating his past and even sometimes his present position from a functionally similar position of Obama's, with whom the dear departed centrist pragmatist Massachusetts Mitt has often been aligned.

Hence Romney must regularly wax paradoxical, continually compiling new verses to this lover's rune:

I gave my love a cherry that had no stone,
I gave my love a chicken that had no bone,
I gave my love a story that had no end,
I gave my love a baby with no cryin'.

But Romney outdid himself this week when reversing the position taken by his aide Erich Fehrnstrom and his own long-held position that the individual mandate is a penalty, not a tax. Listen carefully:

“While I agreed with the dissent, that’s overtaken by the fact that the majority of the Court said it’s a tax and therefore it is a tax. They have spoken. There’s no way around that,” Romney said. “The American people know that President Obama has broken the pledge he made — said he wouldn’t raise taxes on middle-income Americans.”

Not only does Romney here assert that his own reasoning is negated in some existential sense by the Court's 5-4 ruling, along with the reasoning of the four conservative justices with whom he agreed. He is claiming that Obama's long-held position, which matches his own, retroactively became a lie the moment Roberts read the crux of his decision from the bench.  An ex post facto lie.

To what extent did SCOTUS inhibit Congress's power to regulate commerce?

Yesterday, I suggested that the Supreme Court's finding that the individual mandate exceeded Congress's Commerce Clause powers did not in fact crimp Congress's ability to regulate commerce in any significant way, since Congress has no desire to impose any more purchase mandates. Donald Verrilli stressed in his reply brief that health insurance is a unique case, pointing out that states, which have an unquestioned power to impose purchase mandates, don't do it. Justice Ginsburg made the same point in exquisite detail in her dissent with regard to the Commerce Clause.

In today's Times, however, Neal Katyal, who served as acting Solicitor General after Obama appointed Elena Kagan to the Supreme Court and who argued the ACA case at the appellate level, makes a compelling case that the decision did limit the federal government's power and expand the Court's propensity to legislate from the bench in significant ways. Chief among them was in its invalidation of Congress's power to enforce its expanded Medicaid mandate: