“The US Supreme Court to rule individual mandate unconstitutional before midnight ET 31 Dec 2012 (78.2% Chance)”
57% of former SC law clerks also think the mandate will be turned down. http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/poll-former-supreme-court-clerks-think-the-mandate-is-done-for/2012/06/21/gJQAYn8ZtV_blog.html
Likewise, 57% of SCOTUS-watchers at FantasySCOTUS predict the mandate will be turned down. http://www.fantasyscotus.net/healthcare-case-predictions/ This latter group bats around .600 in making predictions about SCOTUS. Note that only 1/3 believe the mandate is not severable, i.e., that if the mandate goes, everything will be struck down.
Thus, the most likely outcome is that part(s) of the law will be voided, leaving the rest of the ugly mess behind. Republicans will need to do the rest of the heavy lifting when it comes to eradicating this turkey.
In response to a message regarding why the severability clause was removed from Obamacare, I replied as follows:
I don’t think it was removed. The House passed its version of the bill first, then the Senate acted shortly before Xmas on a different version of the bill that did not happen to include a severability clause. “An earlier version of the legislation, which passed the House last November, included severability language. But that clause did not make it into the Senate version, which ultimately became law. A Democratic aide who helped write the bill characterized the omission as an oversight.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/27/us/politics/27health.html?_r=1&pagewanted=all
I think at the time, no one was sweating the details, so to speak, since eventually the final version of the bill was to come out of conference committee (which is tasked with reconciling differing versions of the bill passed by each chamber so that the final law can be then passed again by each chamber in identical form to be signed by the president). But Scott Brown’s election in January bollixed that plan because the Senate Dems no longer had 60 votes to pass a conference committee version of the bill. So instead, the House voted to pass (barely) the Senate version of the bill and then they used budget reconciliation to pass a shorter bill that “fixed” the pieces of the Senate bill that the House didn’t like etc.
I’m no congressional expert: I don’t know whether it would have been possible to include a severability clause in the reconciliation bill, since I view such a clause as referring to the legislation its embedded in (i.e., “if any part of THIS statute is found to be unconstitutional, the remaining parts will stand”). It seems somewhat illegitimate to pass a separate bill after the fact that says “if any part of THAT statute (that was signed into law 3 days ago) is found to be unconstitutional, the remaining parts will stand.” The point being, if it were hypothetically possible to have included a severability clause in the reconciliation version of the bill, then failure to do so was an oversight/mistake. But if this were not legal, then the explanation for the failure to include such a clause in the final legislation was due to the unanticipated chaos created by Scott Brown’s election that I described earlier. Hope this helps.
I’m posting this here in case some other Freeper can offer a more knowledgeable explanation.