Down Goes ObamaCare! Down Goes ObamaCare!

by JASmius

.....Maybe:

Justices on the U.S. Supreme Court this morning considered what to do with the rest of President Obama's national health care law if its individual health insurance mandate is struck down. Though it was difficult to get a clear read on their thinking as they asked tough questions of all sides, the Court seemed open to the possibility of overturning the entire law. ...

Deputy Solicitor General Edwin Kneedler, on behalf of the Obama administration, was arguing that only the ban on pre-existing conditions and cap on the cost of policies should be turned down if the mandate was gone. But interestingly, Justice Anthony Kennedy argued this could be seen as more "extreme" than simply striking down the whole law.

You will recall that in their haste to ram this toxic, jackbooted boondoggle down our throats, congressional Dems did not think to include a severability clause, which would have ensured that if part of the law was nullified as unconstitutional, the rest of it could have remained. Now this doesn't require the High Court to knock down all of it, but it leaves the door open to that outcome.

Since the latest conventional wisdom is that the individual mandate is deader than a smelt (remarkable given that before this week the conventional wisdom was that O-Care would be unanimously upheld), it has become imperative for the law's defenders to do everything they can to get the justices to sign on to salvaging the leftovers - which led to this hilarious smackdown from Justice Scalia:

The Regime's answer, of course, is, "Yes, your Honor, we do expect you to read through all 2,700 pages like you were doing six months' worth of grocery shopping at the local Costco supermegastore." Or it would have been if Verrilli had had the balls to piss off Justice Scalia further.

I've always thought that was one of O-Care's built-in defense mechanisms. Congressional Dems boasted at the time that they hadn't read the damn thing - remember Crazy Nancy declaring that they would need to pass it so the rest of us could see what was in it? And it really didn't matter what was in it, they said; all we needed to know is that it was like the David Bowman Starchild thing said about the impending ignition of Jupiter in 2010: The Year We Make Contact: "Something wonderful."

The irony may turn out to be that that very windiness and complexity, combined with the missing severability clause, ends up taking down the whole thing - or upholding it in its entirety. Because Justice Scalia is right: Ain't no way they're going to do Nancy Pelosi's homework two years after the fact. What's Optimus Prime's famous line to Megatron? "One shall stand; one shall fall."

Jeff "PanicMan" Toobin has downgraded his forecast from "train wreck" to "plane wreck":

I'm not quite so....emotionally unstable about the eventual outcome. Seems pretty obvious the vote will be 5-4, with the winning side being determined by which side of bed Justice Kennedy gets out of today or tomorrow. But there won't be any smorgasbord approach to this landmark ruling - either it'll all stand, or it'll all fall.

Better stock up on popcorn - and smelling salts.

[cross-posted @ Hard Starboard]