Thus, the Supreme Court's Obamacare decision. No one could seriously argue that the Framers' vision of the Constitution intended to provide philosophical license for a national government ("federal" hardly seems le mot juste) whose treasury could fine you for declining to make provision for a chest infection that meets the approval of the Commissar of Ailments. Yet on Thursday, Chief Justice John Roberts did just that. And conservatives are supposed to be encouraged that he did so by appeal to the Constitution's taxing authority rather than by a massive expansion of the Commerce Clause. Indeed, several respected commentators portrayed the Chief Justice's majority vote as a finely calibrated act of constitutional seemliness.