From the moment the Supreme Court rewrote Obamacare’s individual insurance mandate as a “tax,” the Obama White House began pushing back, even though the “tax” label is all that saved the law from destruction. But on Thursday, the White House took its denial to a degree of “verbal wizardry” and “sophistry” not seen since Chief Justice John Roberts’ baffling decision.

In defending the law, White House press secretary Jay Carney has moved from merely misrepresenting the law’s effect to mischaracterizing the very Supreme Court decision that upheld it. “[I]t is simply a fallacy to say that this is a broad-based tax. That’s not what the opinion stated that was authored by the chief justice. The [Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act] is constitutional under Congress’s taxing authority, but this is clearly a penalty that affects less than 1 percent of the American population.”