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

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.

If Conservatives get their way and the Supreme Court strikes down the individual mandate to buy health insurance, it would be a real victory for them; but in the end, the last laugh may be with actual progressives. While in this case an individual mandate was used to expand health coverage, similar individual mandates are the cornerstone for corporatist plans to unravel the public social insurance systems created by the New Deal/Great Society.

We were treated yesterday to arguments made by a former Solicitor General of the United States, and embraced by conservative justices of the Supreme Court, that may be the most disingenuous, destructive and dangerous attacks on the Constitution in our lifetimes.

With the Supreme Court oral arguments on the Affordable Care Act now over, my finally impression is that the government’s case for the individual mandate was deeply troubling. It just wasn’t straight forward. The government could have argued that the mandate and associated penalty functioned as a tax and was permissible under Congress’ taxing power, but for unclear reasons it chose not to make this unambiguous argument.

The individual mandate will actually have almost no impact on what a majority of people using the new exchanges would pay for health insurance. That’s because for most people using the new exchanges, their cost of insurance will be determined by the affordable tax credits. According to the CBO’s projections, roughly 60 percent of people getting insurance in the non-group market will qualify for affordability tax credits.

The Obama administration seems to believe that the group health insurance market currently “works.” That is why the Affordable Care Act doesn’t change much about the group market. This creates a logical problem for the administration when it tries to argue that the individual mandate for the individual market can’t be severed from the ACA’s main new consumer protections, such as guaranteed issue and community ratings.

The Supreme Court heard oral argument on the requirement that people have health insurance, the mandate. Transcript and audio version here. One of the issues was the constitutional limits on the powers of Congress under the Commerce Clause. Article I, § 8 gives Congress the power: “To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes.” In recent times, this clause has been given a broad interpretation, but there are limits.

To the general public, all that matters are the headlines, reflecting the bottom line. The universal consensus among reporters who attended the 90-minute Supreme Court argument yesterday on whether an 1867 law called the Anti-Injunction Act bars the Court from considering challenges to the constitutionality of ACA’s individual-mandate provision was that the justices will decide the constitutionality of the mandate provision despite the AIA.

The Urban Institute is out with a new policy brief claiming the individual mandate will only affect 2-5% of the population, and it has managed to get some media traction. The problem is that the whole brief has a huge logical problem by looking at only a tiny window of time.