Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus is dismayed that President Obama would call into question the political legitimacy of the Supreme Court should they overturn the Affordable Care Act, a decisin she also says would be not only bad for health care but bad for the Court itself. Bad Barack. Bad Ruth.

The Village, your place for self-important delusion since Pierre Charles L’Enfant got fired. First, let us congratulate Pat Buchanan for so quickly and deftly replacing the hole in his heart-like organ John Demjanjuk left, naturally with George Zimmerman. And it is about an irreconcilable conflict of visions about what the real America is in the [...]

I don’t care what you think about the health care law, a structure of government with a judicial review that feels free to parse legislation line by line and make what amount to ideological pronouncements on what can go forward and what cannot sounds a death rattle for progressive governance over time.

The conservative majority on the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 today that police have the discretion to strip search people arrested even for minor offenses. I’m just not feeling the bow to judicial restraint here. The Court explicitly ruled that you can get strip-searched if jailed for failure to pay a speeding ticket. That was the underlying case here (and it was actually a false arrest, as the man did pay the ticket). What happens if you’re arrested for protesting in front of the Supreme Court, or the White House?

There’s an argument that if the Supreme Court strikes down the ACA, it signals the court is so radical it would also find a reason to strike down Medicare for all. I find it nearly impossible to ever think this Court would ever be that activist. Not only do I think a majority of the justices have enough personal integrity to reject such a naked power grab, but more importantly I think the Justices are smart enough to properly fear the ramifications for the Court from such move.

If you are unable to get ABC and wish to have a comparable intellectual discussion, rent a copy of Animal House.

Your worship of your own economic freedom is no reason for me to pay for your health care.

The answer to the title’s question—Can your state mandate that you buy broccoli or join a gym?—depends upon which of the two possible grounds the 5-4 Supreme Court majority overturns the ACA’s individual-mandate provision. And which grounds the majority selects also will determine whether under the Court’s new “liberty” jurisprudence, Social Security and Medicare also are unconstitutional.

Giving post-mortems on the question of health care at the Supreme Court is premature, and as law professor David Cole writes, you can find as much evidence for upholding Obamacare in the text of the arguments as you can evidence for tossing it out.

However, as a political spectacle, with the eyes of the nation upon them, it was clear to see that we have a large contingent, perhaps a majority, of committed judicial activists on the Court.

To understand how we got to the point where the Supreme Court could potentially strike down the entire Affordable Care Act because of the individual mandate, it is important to identify the string of stupid mistakes Democrats made that got us to this point. By my current count, Democrats had at least eight big chances to avoid this possible that they completely messed up.