Craziest Republican of the Day: Louis Gohmert

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Republicans love their anti-Obama conspiracy theories, but Rep. Louis "terror babies" Gohmert (R-Tex.), one of the craziest around, was able to kick it up a notch on Wednesday by linking health-care reform to the current intervention in Libya:

It's a bad bill. And then when you find out that the prior Congress not only passed that 2,800 page bill with all kinds of things in it, including a new president's commissioned officer corps and non-commissioned officer corps. Do we really need that? I wondered when I read that in the bill. But then when you find out we're being sent to Libya to use our treasure and American lives there, maybe there's intention to so deplete the military that we're going to need that presidential reserve officer commissioned corps and non-commissioned corps that the president can call up on a moment's notice involuntarily, according to the Obamacare bill.

Umm... what? I realize that Republicans aren't quite sure what to do about Libya -- they generally support military intervention of any kind but also oppose anything Obama does, making it tricky -- but this is stupid even by their standards.

Suggesting that Obama is using Libya to unleash some private presidential army on America? That's insane. As Media Matters explains (you know, because it has the facts at hand):

Despite the claims in right-wing chainemails, the health care law did not give Obama some sort of "private army."The legislation did create the ReadyReserve Corps, a new component of the U.S. Public Health ServiceCommissioned Corps, but there was nothing nefarious about it. The purpose ofthe Ready Reserve Corps is simply to make the Public Health Service -- whichpreviously "did not have a reserve component to call upon" in times of crisis -- better prepared to respond to emergencies.

As FactCheck.org noted after thebill passed, "Thetruth about the new Ready Reserve Corps is a lot less interesting than theconspiracy theories." But of course, Gohmert has always been more interestedin conspiracytheories thanthe truth.

Gohmert and so many others in the Republican Party, which continues its descent into madness without so much as a glimmer of hope.

(image -- along with more craziness from Gohmert)

The straw that broke the liberal's back?

By Nicholas Wilbur

A band of liberal revolutionaries is storming the Capitol, hip-checking elderly Tea Party activists and snatching the anti-Obama protest signs right from their arthritic hands. They're chanting, screaming, wailing – "Traitor," "Vile Betrayer," "No-bama, No-bama..." – and tearing the cloth from their breasts in agony as they fall to their knees, pound the earth with clenched fists, and curse the gods of progressivism for the posturing con artist occupying the White House. American flags burn in the background. Hope and Change T-shirts burn in the foreground. Blue flames crisscross like daggers in the sky as the ominous clouds form like cyclones above the White House. The governors who have gathered with Obama inside the State Dining Room are all smiles and nods as the president explains his openness to the idea of letting individual states create their own health-care laws in lieu of the ever-unpopular "ObamaCare" legislation, while everyone outside hoists pitchforks and decries the unraveling of populism, not as they know it, but as they imagine it.

When I saw the headline from The Hill, "Obama backtracks on health mandate, wants to allow earlier opt-out," this was the fantasy my conscious mind created as it envisioned the reaction of the news from left-wing diehards, bleeding hearts, and feverish bloggers.

The already fine line between fantasy and political reality draws paper thin the more time President Obama spends in the White House. The details don't matter to the extremists on the left who envisioned Obama during the campaign as a messiah of modern American leadership. Politics today is less about policy than it is about perceptions, and the president's admission that his health-care law could be altered or amended if such adjustments helped the country implement across-the-board reforms serves only to ignite the flames of doubt and fuel the fires of intra-party betrayal in the eyes of uncompromising liberals.

He's already guilty of compromise, negotiation and capitulation – the trifecta of evil that is embodied, historically, by those whose souls are either sold to the powerful deal-makers within Washington or bought by the corporate lobbyists without. We saw it first when he gave up on the single-payer health care option. We saw it a second time in his deal with Republicans to cut taxes for the rich. We're seeing it again with this appeal to bipartisanship over implementation of what is arguably the most historic piece of social legislation enacted in Congress since civil rights.

For the lefties who voted for, campaigned for, and prayed to their Wiccan goddesses for a progressive panacea to the Bush era, this may prove to be the straw that broke the liberal's back.

And yet it means nothing to the pragmatists who understand that consensus is key to any law and that popularity is paramount to any successful legislation.

Twenty-five governors – representing half the country – have filed suit against the series of reforms included in the 2010 legislation that conservatives refer to as "ObamaCare." Polls consistently show an equal division of opinion on whether the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act is good or bad for America. And minds are still unmade as to whether repeal of "ObamaCare" is better than the health insurance company abuses that plagued the country before such protections were put in place.

If it is disappointing to a certain faction of the American public that Obama has decided to continue his efforts to improve the law that will most likely define his presidency, then that in itself is disappointing. It is, after all, the liberal class in America that boasts of top placement on the intellectual hierarchy of the political – and social – ladder. They should be the first not only to understand but to appropriately analyze the limitations of bureaucracy, the stalwart opposition to change, and the restraints of progressivism. They are not only its advocates but its victims.

The president's abandonment of the single-payer option nearly split the Democratic Party in two, even if it was consistent with his campaign promise to lead by consensus, not with an iron fist. His capitulation on tax cuts nearly severed his ties not only to liberals but to fiscally conservative Blue Dog Democrats, and he accepted that blowback as a consequence of his suddenly treasonous promise to reach out, whenever possible, to his opponents in Washington. It's worth mentioning that all of his alleged "capitulations" polled well for him, as the general public seemed to appreciate that a national leader tried to unite the country with a willingness to compromise rather than to divide the country by refusing to listen to the opposition.

It seems not every Democrat in America is liberal. (Somewhere in the world, a bird of idealism dropped dead from surprise.) 

(Cross-posted at Muddy Politics.)

Mitt Romney is toast

By Michael J.W. Stickings 

According to a spokesman, "Mitt Romney is proud of what he accomplished for Massachusetts in getting everyone covered."

According to that spokesman, "Romneycare" isn't like the Affordable Care Act (i.e., "Obamacare," according to Republican propaganda) because it's a single-state system, not a national one, and because "[a] one-size-fits-all plan for the entire nation just doesn't work." States, he asserted, should have "the power to determine their own healthcare solutions."

There is much to recommend Romneycare, once the sort of thing Republicans supported, but the argument that states should all have their own individual systems is silly. Moreover, the two systems are "essentially the same," as Yglesias noted last year -- Romneycare even includes a dreaded individual mandate, now the main target of opponents of the Affordable Care Act -- and Romney has been all over the place distancing himself from the Affordable Care Act. He's obviously landed now on the federal/state distinction, but that won't get him anywhere in today's GOP. Indeed, Karl Rove said last month that Romney basically needs to admit that his heath-care reform in Massachusetts was wrong and that he should apologize for it. Apparently that's not about to happen, not with Romney adamantly defending the Obama-like system that bears his name.

Prediction: Mitt Romney will not be the Republican nominee for president in 2012. He's toast. And, try as he might to protest his sufficiently right-wing cred, he's just making it worse for himself. He did a very good thing in Massachusetts, something he should be very proud of. Don't expect Republicans, and particularly the base, to give him the benefit of anything. They'll destroy him, and that will be that.

(Yes, that's the easiest prediction I've made in a long time, maybe since I picked Christine O'Donnell to lose the Delaware Senate race in a landslide. I don't claim to be a crystal ball. Some things are just obvious.)

How the GOP is a party of words: Promises are promises are promises...

By Nicholas Wilbur

Transitions are always difficult. If you're a Republican, Change® is particularly tough to swallow – which is why the GOP spent the last two years projectile vomiting on anything that tasted like "Progress" and throwing filibuster tantrums whenever Congress debated a bill on Capitol Hill.

They swept the midterm elections, nonetheless, not with a strong record – or any record at all – but by riding the coattails of the anti-government prattle of the Tea Party patriots who flooded the mainstream media with sensational circus theatrics and apocalyptic prophesies of the country's imminent demise were Democrats to remain in power.

The seemingly sane but obviously stubborn Republicans teamed up with Tea Party candidates and capitalized on the nation's fears and doubts by crafting a national message so bold it could not be ignored, even by liberals, who, for good or ill, were transfixed. Traditional Republicans, as the media has since dubbed the non-Tea Partiers, touted a "repeal and replace" strategy to undo the alleged devastation wrought by the Obama Administration and his Democratic Party minions in Congress. The Teabaggers, as the left-wing media dubbed the ideological extremists, did their part by peppering the rhetoric with threats to amend the Constitution and deny citizenship to brown people, abolish the IRS, and defund the departments of interior, commerce and education that these Fox News junkies believed had become a black hole for taxpayer dollars. 

But Republicans knew they couldn't continue riding in the back of the leadership bus through 2011. With majority control of the lower branch of Congress, there was a sudden expectation that these new leaders would actually lead, that these new lawmakers would actually make laws. Bitching and whining and obstructing the legislative process at every turn would not suffice with majority status in "the people's house" of Congress. 

They had to appear, at least on the surface, that they were worthy of the government paychecks they received.

And so, after a year-long campaign focused on accusing Democrats of ignoring the main concern of the American people – job creation – Republicans got right down to business upon entering office. Sort of. 

They amended the House rules to require that all bills brought to the floor include a constitutional citation of lawfulness. They rescinded the already limited voting rights of delegates from D.C., Puerto Rico, American Samoa, and elsewhere. They required that all bills include spending cuts to offset any costs needed for implementation of the newly-proposed legislation (exempting, of course, tax cuts for the rich and their repeal of President Obama's health-care law). And they changed the House schedule to give every lawmaker one week off for every two weeks worked. 

That was just the beginning. 

As they settled into their new positions of power, Republicans showed their dedication to the financially strapped American working class by introducing... a bill to remove the polar bear from the endangered species list, a bill to abolish the IRS and eliminate the income tax, and another bill that would redefine rape. 

Having promised to cut $100 billion from the federal budget this fiscal year, Republicans drafted legislation to free up a whopping $61 million (yes, million) in the budget by abolishing public financing for presidential elections. Most recently, they voted on what amounts to an office memo, a skeletal outline, a very rough, very unspecific, and very ambiguous House Resolution that calls for $32 billion in cuts.

Not exactly landmark legislation. Not legislation at all, in most cases. In fact, the only significant piece of legislation proposed thus far by Republicans has been the health-care repeal bill, which, given its chances of becoming law, wasn't much of a bill at all. They spent the last year promising to "repeal and replace" the 2,000-plus-page law known by conservatives as "ObamaCare," but the "replace" portion of the promise was conveniently absent from the two-paragraph repeal bill passed in the House. As they knew it would, this faux legislation failed in the Senate.

So here we are one month into the new Congress, with Republicans still reeling from a landslide victory over Democrats in the midterm election, and what do we have to show for it? 

Nothing. 

And looking back, we should not be surprised. We all saw this coming. 

After "shellacking" Democrats in the midterm elections, Republicans returned to Washington intent on "saving millions of taxpayer dollars." They began this quest by attempting to eliminate grant funding for public radio. The $3.2 million in projected annual savings was pittance, they knew, and doomed to failure, as they eventually saw. But they tooted their horns and banged their drums nonetheless, eventually blaming liberals for offering government handouts to Not Pro Republican media outlets. Next in line: banning earmarks, another pittance estimated to save $16 billion a year. That fell flat when Republicans realized that banning earmarks meant they could no longer fund infrastructure projects in their home states. There were also targeted efforts to deny unemployment benefits, thwart the judicial "interference" in cases where employees are raped on the job, and kill a bill to award health care to 9/11 first responders. 

The last two months of the 111th Congress saw more of the same blind Republican opposition that had defined their presence in Washington, really, since Democrats won the majority in 2006. In the final days of 2010, Republicans followed up their backward opposition to the DREAM Act and the repeal of "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" by fighting vigorously against even the no-brainer nuclear arms treaty with Russia, New START. 

They railed against excessive government spending (without acknowledging their role in the unpaid-for prescription drug program, the Bush tax cuts, and the two wars that created a $1.3 trillion deficit by the end of Bush's second term), but then balked when it came time to identify specific spending cuts. Perhaps in their most egregious display of hypocrisy, Republicans threatened to shut down the government if President Obama and the Democrats didn't get on board with the GOP priority of extending Bush's tax cuts for another two years. 

It worked. The rich kept their disproportionate tax breaks, but the result didn't quite live up to the Republican Party's pledge to cut spending back to 2008 levels, as outlined in their "Pledge to America" campaign manifesto. Conversely, it cost about $100 billion more than the 2009 economic stimulus bill they so loathed. 

The empty promises, the lofty and impractical goals, the "repeal and replace" agenda that has thus far come up empty on both fronts – these have all proven mere strategies in a shell game of hallow rhetoric meant to brainwash taxpayers into thinking that their new leaders in Washington are well-deserving of the $174,000 (plus health care benefits) that we pay them for representing We the People.

The naysayers and witch hunters of anything smelling of liberalism have demonstrated that they are not patriots defending against Socialism as much as they are stalwart defenders of the Bush-era status quo. The people loved them for it throughout the last congressional session, they praised them for it throughout the campaign season, and they turned out in swaths to reward them for it at the ballot box on Nov. 2, 2010. Now a month into the 112th Congress, Republicans are enjoying their highest popularity rating in years.

Republicans interpreted the last election as a mandate against the progressive agenda. Voters, they said, showed unequivocally that they wanted whatever was the opposite of progress and change. 

This is about as close as it gets.

(Cross-posted at Muddy Politics.) 

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Background photo of John Boehner from National Journal.

Republican favorable/unfavorable chart from Gallup.

Senate rejects Republican health-care repeal effort

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Not much drama here. The GOP-controlled House voted to repeal the Affordable Care Act, but it was clear that the repeal effort wasn't going anywhere, what with Democrats still in control in the Senate and, of course, with Obama prepared to use the veto if necessary.

So today the Senate voted along party lines, 51-57, against repeal.

And that, as they say, is that, at least as far as Congress is concerned. The issue will continue to play out in the courts, where Republicans are trying to use the law's individual mandate to bring the whole thing down. And it will ultimately be up to the Supreme Court to rule on it.

**********

There's nothing funny about what the Republicans are doing, even if their effort is pathetically misguided and without merit.

But this -- this is funny:

Republicans Vote To Repeal Obama-Backed Bill That Would Destroy Asteroid Headed For Earth

WASHINGTON—In a strong rebuke of President Obama and his domestic agenda, all 242 House Republicans voted Wednesday to repeal the Asteroid Destruction and American Preservation Act, which was signed into law last year to destroy the immense asteroid currently hurtling toward Earth.

The $440 billion legislation, which would send a dozen high-thrust plasma impactor probes to shatter the massive asteroid before it strikes the planet, would affect more than 300 million Americans and is strongly opposed by the GOP.

"The voters sent us to Washington to stand up for individual liberty, not big government," Rep. Steve King (R-IA) said at a press conference. "Obama's plan would take away citizens' fundamental freedoms, forcing each of us into hastily built concrete bunkers and empowering the federal government to ration our access to food, water, and potassium iodide tablets while underground."

"We believe that the decisions of how to deal with the massive asteroid are best left to the individual," King added.

Repealing the act, which opponents have branded 'Obamastroid,' has been the cornerstone of the GOP agenda since the law's passage last August. Throughout the 2010 elections, Republican candidates claimed that the Democrats' plan to smash the space rock and shield citizens from its fragments was "a classic example of the federal government needlessly interfering in the lives of everyday Americans."

"This law is a job killer," said Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-NC), who argued the tax increases required to save the human species from annihilation would impose unbearably high costs on businesses. "If we sit back and do nothing, Obamastroid will result in hundreds of thousands of lost jobs, which we simply can't afford in this economy."

"And consider how much money this program will add to our already bloated deficit," Foxx continued. "Is this the legacy we want to leave our children?"

Very funny -- especially so because it could very well be true. It gets the Republicans perfectly.

Activist judge Roger Vinson's ruling makes George Washington unconstitutional

By Nicholas Wilbur

I'm not an ambulance chaser, nor am I a judge. I can't even claim sidekick status to a comic book superhero who rights the wrongs of America with his doctorate in constitutional law.

But riddle me this, Batman: If the president signed a law forcing every American to purchase a rifle and ammunition in preparation for a possible call to active military duty, but the Constitution specifically forbade forcing Americans to purchase ammunition, could a federal judge then overturn the entire law – including the rifle mandate – on the basis that only the ammunition portion of the law was illegal?

A judge in Florida has ruled against President Obama's health-care reform law, saying that the provision that forces Americans to buy health insurance is a breach of Congress' constitutional authority. He did not argue the illegality of the law's other provisions. He said only that the mandate (the ammunition provision, in this seemingly left-field metaphor) was unconstitutional.

Federal district judge Roger Vinson argued that, "[b]ecause the individual mandate is unconstitutional and not severable, the entire act must be declared void."

It would be easy to brand this 70-year-old, bachelor's degree-educated wannabe Tea Partier as a kook who admitted to relying on the legally insignificant analyses of a known hate group to craft his ruling. Rest assured, his education, his age, and his apparent bias do not play into my critique. Calling Vinson a geriatric Frankenstein pig fucker with shit for brains would not be a merit-based evaluation of his mental capacity, his overall intelligence, and his cognitive ability to perform the duties expected of a judge, which is why I'm not arguing that he's a pig fucker. I'm merely asking how a man tasked with interpreting the legality of public policy can denounce every aspect of a law on the basis that one aspect of it is, in his opinion, unconstitutional.

Rather than rule only against the mandate portion of the law, as was the expectation and the precedent set in a mirror ruling made by a federal judge in Virginia, Vinson, a Ronald Reagan appointee, instead threw out the entire law on the basis that all the reforms will fail without the mandate. Granted, President Obama's health-care law doesn't include a "severability clause" that would allow the judge to strike down a portion of the law without invalidating the entire law, but if Vinson believes the entire law is illegal, then why didn't he issue an injunction against the policy and immediately halt its implementation?

First of all, we must ask if the health-care law itself would be invalidated without the mandate, as that is the basis for Vinson's ruling. It turns out several states have created laws banning insurance companies from denying coverage based on pre-existing conditions. Also, Vinson did not rule that the provision in the law that allows children to stay on their parents' insurance plans until age 26 was unconstitutional. These provisions would still be in place without the mandate. They would still be legal.

It doesn't require a magnifying glass to read between the lines of Vinson's ruling. He's saying what even the president has said – that without the mandate, the bill would fail. But failure, in this sense, means it wouldn't generate the revenue predicted, it wouldn't achieve the coverage rates predicted, and it wouldn't lower costs for individual insurance consumers as predicted.

The question, however, is not whether or not the bill is effective. It is the job of Congress, of lawmakers, policy experts, and legislative analysts to determine the effectiveness of a bill. The question is, when did it become the job of a judge, of an interpreter of the law, to decide effectiveness?

We talk often, and we often talk vehemently, about "activist" judges. Any leftist who angers the right is an activist judge. Any right-winger who pisses off the left is an activist judge. In most cases, these are ideological critiques, not merit-based evaluations.

This, I think, is one of the few cases where the "judicial activism" argument holds water. It would not be inappropriate for a federal judge to air his personal views that health-care reform would be cheapened without a mandate. We wouldn't balk at the observation, as the president and nearly every Democrat in Congress has already admitted as much. But is it appropriate that a judge has shot down an entire law based on the personal evaluation of how effective a law would be without the one portion he has deemed unconstitutional?

That's the question. I'm open to critiques.

As for my seemingly unrelated metaphor of the rifle and ammunition mandates, that actually happened. It was, in fact, one of the framers of the Constitution, George Washington, who forced every American to arm himself. In a way, this was health-care insurance, 1770s-style. No judge ruled it unconstitutional. Probably few citizens deemed the mandates unjust. It was logical to protect oneself. And in that sense, its no different than modern health-care reform.

(Cross-posted from Muddy Politics.)

South Dakota legislators introduce bill requiring all adults to buy a gun

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Five Republican lawmakers in South Dakota have introduced a bill that, if passed, would require all adults over the age of 21 to purchase a firearm "sufficient to provide for their ordinary self-defense":

The measure is known as an act "to provide for an individual mandate to adult citizens to provide for the self defense of themselves and others."

Rep. Hal Wick, R-Sioux Falls, is sponsoring the bill and knows it will be killed. But he said he is introducing it to prove a point that the federal health care reform mandate passed last year is unconstitutional.

"Do I or the other co-sponsors believe that the State of South Dakota can require citizens to buy firearms? Of course not. But at the same time, we do not believe the federal government can order every citizen to buy health insurance," he said.

First, being armed is not the same as having health insurance. We're living in a society, as George Costanza said, not in some Hobbesian state of nature.

Second, the conservative argument that the Affordable Care Act's individual mandate is unconstitutional is deeply flawed. (And the two activist rulings, in Virginia and Florida, against the mandate were both deeply partisan.)

Third... well, here's Jack Balkin:

The irony, of course, is that this is an example of what the federal government could require citizens to do at the founding. All able bodied male citizens were part of the militia, and therefore were required to bear arms in defense of the state. In fact, the federal government passed a militia act in 1792 that required that every citizen purchase a weapon and ammunition.

Oops. Nice try, idiotic South Dakota Republicans.

Balkin again, utterly and brilliantly destroying conservative opposition to the mandate: 

What is lost in the debate over the individual mandate is that the point of the individual mandate is also civic republican in nature. It requires citizens to make a far less significant but also public-spirited sacrifice on behalf of other Americans who cannot afford health insurance. Individuals must join health insurance risk pools to make health care affordable for more of their fellow citizens. This is a very modest request that individuals not be entirely selfish and that they contribute to the public good in a small way by helping to make health care accessible and affordable for all Americans. Indeed, under the terms of the Affordable Care Act, one doesn't even have to purchase insurance; one can simply pay a small tax instead. And one doesn't have to pay at all if one is too poor to do so or has a religious objection.

The notion that being asked to either buy health insurance and make health care accessible for one's fellow citizens--or to pay a small tax-- is a form of tyranny akin to George III's regime is simply bizarre: it shows how perverted and twisted public discourse has become in the United States. The assault on the individual mandate is really an assault on the public duty to assist other Americans in need, and in particular, an assault on the legal obligation to pay taxes to contribute to the general welfare. The assault on the health care bill is not a defense of liberty. It is a defense of selfishness. 

Which is pretty much what the Republican Party is all about, along with a complete lack of regard both for American history and for the Constitution they claim to love so dearly.

Right-wing Republican judge rules health-care law unconstitutional

By Michael J.W. Stickings

So what else is new?

Republican-appointed judges, embracing conservative judicial activism (even if they would deny it), are ruling against the Affordable Care Act and basing their decisions on spurious legal reasoning:

A second federal judge ruled on Monday that it was unconstitutional for Congress to enact a health care law that required Americans to obtain commercial insurance, evening the score at 2 to 2 in the lower courts as conflicting opinions begin their path to the Supreme Court.

But unlike a Virginia judge in December, Judge Roger Vinson of Federal District Court in Pensacola, Fla., concluded that the insurance requirement was so "inextricably bound" to other provisions of the Affordable Care Act that its unconstitutionality required the invalidation of the entire law.

"The act, like a defectively designed watch, needs to be redesigned and reconstructed by the watchmaker," Judge Vinson wrote.

How odd that Vinson's words are a metaphorical version of the standard Republican talking point -- repeal and reform, even if Republicans have no alternative plan and no intention of introducing one anytime soon. (It's important to note, too, that Vinson based his decision to a great extent on the views of the right-wing, theocratic Family Research Council, hardly an impartial source.)

Ultimately, the law will be reviewed by the Supreme Court, so it doesn't much matter how these lower courts rule. Although, of course, the Supreme Court, with a 5-4 conservative majority, is partisan and, when it wants to be, activist. (Kennedy will likely be the swing vote, as usual.)

But Steve Benen makes some excellent points in putting this latest ruling into perspective:

First Update: Note that when Judge Henry Hudson of Virginia, a Bush appointee, reached a similar conclusion in December, in a ruling that no one seemed to think made any sense, he said the individual mandate is unconstitutional, but left the rest of the law intact. Reagan appointee Vinson, however, took a far more activist approach, striking down a massive piece of legislation because of one provision.

Republicans are thrilled, of course, because activist court rulings are to be celebrated, just so long as it's activism the right can agree with. 

Second Update: It's also worth emphasizing that two Republican-appointed federal district court judges have now found that the individual mandate -- an idea Republicans came up with -- is unconstitutional. And while that's important, let's not forget two other federal district court judges, appointed by Democratic presidents, came to the opposite conclusion.

Indeed, overall, about a dozen federal courts have dismissed challenges to the health care law.

In other words, when you hear on the news that "courts" have a problem with the Affordable Care Act, remember that it's actually a minority of the judges who've heard cases related to the law.

Aside from the obvious activism on display here, that last point is crucial. Only two judges, both Republican-appointed, have ruled against the mandate (the second also against the entire piece of legislation). The media focus disproportionately on these negative rulings, rulings that would seem to validate the Republican position, but the reality is that the law, including the mandate, has thus far been upheld everywhere else.

There's hardly any guarantee that the Supreme Court will uphold the law, but claims of the Affordable Care Act's demise are greatly exaggerated.