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“Hadn’t got the vote detail before the post. I guess that with Wickard and whatever as accepted, Congress has authority to do anything now.”

On the contrary, five Justices (Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas and Alito) declared that the Commerce Clause did not authorize Congress to pass the individual mandate, because Congress cannot force people to enter into commerce in order to claim the right to regulate such commerce. As Roberts wrote in his opinion, “The Federal Government does not have the power to order people to buy health insurance.” SCOTUS did not expand Commerce Clause jurisprudence here; in fact, it restricted most scholars’ (misguided) conception of what Congress could do under the Commerce Clause. In many ways, this was Lopez II.

What Roberts did was uphold Obamacare by pretending that there was no individual mandate, merely a tax on persons who choose not to buy health insurance (which would only have to be paid by people who would be federal taxpayers anyhow, and the amount of the tax would be lower than the cost of insurance and would depend on the person’s taxable income and deductions). Roberts said that the law’s penalty was really a tax, and that it was not so onerous as to have been a disguised penalty.

The most silver-hued lining of the mandate’s penalty being deemed a tax is that the “tax” presumably could be repealed in budget reconciliation, where the Democrats couldn’t filibuster. However, the GOP needs to win the Senate and the presidency back first.

And while I the provisions forcing insurers to accept persons with preexisting conditions, having children of insured persons stay on their parents’ policy until they turn 26, etc. perhaps can’t be repealed through reconciliation (at least it couldn’t under my interpretation of what constitutes a budgetary measure), I don’t think the Democrats would filibuster many of these repeals (least of all the preexisting-conditions mandate for insurers) if the “tax” that “encourages” (Roberts claims that it doesn’t “force” anyone to do anything) purchasing insurance is repealed through reconciliation. Repealing the tax would allow healthy people not to buy the mandated insurance, which would take away the income on which insurance companies were counting to offset the ridiculous costs they’ll bear by having to insure people for preexisting conditions, and pretty much would bankrupt every insurance company in America if several of those other provisions are not repealed as well. Insurance companies would not allow Democrats to filibuster the repeal of the preexisting conditions clause.

I must reiterate that we must hold the House and win back the Senate and—this cannot be underemphasized—the presidency. President Obama must be swept out of office, and Mitt Romney, for all his flaws and as much as I distrust him, is the only person with a working broom.