Thomas Sowell devotes his latest column to U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts’ disappointing decision in the Supreme Court’s federal health care case.

The chief justice probably made as good a case as could be made for upholding the constitutionality of Obamacare by defining one of its key features as a “tax.”

The legislation didn’t call it a tax, and Chief Justice Roberts admitted that this might not be the most “natural” reading of the law. But he fell back on the longstanding principle of judicial interpretation that the courts should not declare a law unconstitutional if it can be reasonably read in a way that would make it constitutional, out of “deference” to the legislative branch of government.

But this question, like so many questions in life, is a matter of degree. How far do you bend over backwards to avoid the obvious: that Obamacare was an unprecedented extension of federal power over the lives of 300 million Americans today and of generations yet unborn?

These are the people that Chief Justice Roberts betrayed when he declared constitutional something that is nowhere authorized in the Constitution of the United States.

Sowell does not, however, label Roberts a clever wimp.