Well, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals just torpedoed the amended Sissel vs. HHS appeal.

So the second-highest court in the land has definitely decided that it doesn't want to jump into John Roberts's judicial ObamaCare doo-doo.

As the courts go absolutely Keystone Kops about ObamaCare, practically everyone's laughing at the Constitution.  Mind you, the D.C. Circuit and the Fourth Circuit also recently added to all the antics with their conflicting opinions about the IRS's illegal extension of the ObamaCare subsidy to those buying health care on the federal exchange rather than the few state ones.

Consider, re: Sissel vs HHS:

(1) Harry Reid's Senate unconstitutionally exercised the Commerce Clause to legislate an ObamaCare penalty.

(2) Sissel initiated legal action against this unconstitutional exercise of the Commerce Clause.

(3) Meanwhile, unconstitutionally exercising its judicial authority, the Supreme Court legislated the Senate's unconstitutional Commerce Clause penalty into a putatively constitutional tax.

(4) The judicially legislated tax itself then became doubly unconstitutional, because its origination (albeit as a penalty) in the Senate also, thereupon, violated the Origination Clause.

(5) Accordingly, Sissel amended his action to incorporate the Origination Clause grounds.

(6) Now the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals has just ruled (its lower Court earlier did so) that the tax doesn't violate the Origination Clause because it isn't truly a real tax after all, but just some sort of a...well, you know, non-revenue-raising legislative blackjack or whatever-maybe-kind of incidentally masquerading as a cousin-twice-removed to a tax, in order to coerce the people of the United States into doing something unconstitutional under the Commerce Clause or under the Origination Clause or under anything else anywhere else in the U.S. Constitution.

So what is this constitutional hot potato at the heart of ObamaCare?  It is a penalty?  Is it a tax?  Is it a jabberwock?  Is it a jubjub bird?  Is it a frumious bandersnatch?

Whatever it is, it now looks like John Roberts will get to play judicial Humpty Dumpty at least one or two more ObamaCare times (you know, as Humpty said, "When I use a word ... it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less").

But, afterward, it'll be the nation's health care system and its Constitution that all the king's horses and all the king's men can't put back together again.

As the situation stands now, apparently the federal legislature can "massively – and unconstitutionally," as the Pacific Legal Foundation characterizes it, raise our taxes in order merely to blackjack us into buying something (like a new brand of health care) we don't want to buy or doing something (like pretty much anything else) we don't want to do.  Oh, yeah, and the IRS may be able to regulate into existence subsidy recipients expressly excluded by the statutory provisions that the IRS regulations are putatively implementing.

The fundamental transformation of America proceeds.

Military types I remember used to have a term for this kind of stuff.  The term started with "cluster."

And that pretty much sums up the whole Obama spectacle – from beginning to end.