It is time that our constitutional courts formally recognize what constitutional interpretation has created over two centuries. Of course constitutional law is limited by the document’s text. But we must interpret the text by finding principles that justify it in political morality, and we must test statutes against the text not by abstract semantics but by asking whether the statutes respect those principles. The Chief Justice’s reasoning contains an unwitting insight. The national power to tax is not just a mechanism for financing armies and courts. It is an indispensible means of creating one nation, indivisible, with fairness for all.

The Affordable Care Act’s mandate is not just another example of economic regulation of an interstate industry like cars or steel. It does not impose a tax in the ordinary political meaning. No one thought when the act was passed that Obama had broken his promise not to raise middle-class taxes: that claim is a sudden invention of opportunistic Republicans first denied and then embraced by Mitt Romney. But the act is nevertheless best understood as in the long tradition of mandatory insurance for the sake of justice.

Republican tax aides say the vast majority of the benefits Democrats are seeking to preserve are not tax cuts but checks written by the Internal Revenue Service and sent to the working poor. Given the huge increase in government aid, like food stamps and unemployment benefits, letting some assistance lapse makes sense, they say.

N. Gregory Mankiw, a former Bush White House economic aide and an adviser to Mitt Romney, said that a typical family in the lowest 20 percent of the income scale now receives $3 in government benefits for every $1 earned. Even the middle 20 percent receives slightly more in government largess than it pays in taxes, he said.

“What happened to the failed stimulus being ‘targeted, timely and temporary?’ ” asked Antonia Ferrier, a spokeswoman for Senate Finance Committee Republicans. “With our economy as weak as it is, stopping the president’s massive tax increase on nearly a million small businesses and then overhauling our burdensome tax code is how we’ll get America moving again. The same can’t be said for keeping the expanded stimulus spending through the tax code.”

In other words, Barack Obama and his franchise are emulating the Clinton’s, and are speaking not to voters, but to potential post-election patrons. That’s what their policy goals are organized around. So when you hear someone talking about how politicians just want to be reelected, roll your eyes. When you hear an argument about the best message or policy framework to use for reelection, stop listening. That’s not what politicians really care about. Elections in many ways are just like regular season games in basketball – they are worth winning, but it’s not worth risking an injury. The reason Obama won’t prosecute bankers, or run anything but a very mild sort of populism, is because he’s not really talking to voters. He just wants to be slightly more appealing than Romney. He’s really talking to the people who made Bill and Hillary Clinton a very wealthy couple, his future prospective clients. We don’t call it bribery, but that’s what it is. Bill Clinton made a lot of money when he signed the bill deregulating derivatives and repealed Glass-Steagall. The payout just came later, in the form of speaking fees from elite banks and their allies.

Ironically, Clinton has come to express regret about deregulating derivatives. He has not given the money back.