I'm beginning to wonder whether president Obama's statement earlier today reflected some inside information that the case has already been decided by vote against the mandate, and that the campaign against the Supreme Court and the intransigent House and the filibustered Senate is about to begin in a major roll of the dice for Obama. And yes, many were surprised by last week's hearing. Before oral arguments, Ilya Somin, who's against Obamacare's individual mandate, bet that the Supreme Court would rule against him. But he wasn't slack-jawed by the three days of scrutiny, unlike some liberal legal analysts:
[T]here is a big difference between predicting that the mandate would be upheld and claiming that the anti-mandate lawsuits were silly and frivolous – which is what many liberal commentators were saying, as late as the eve of the oral argument. A suit with a 35% chance of winning may deserve to lose. But it’s not frivolous.
Even if such a viewpoint was defensible when the lawsuits began two years ago, it clearly was not after four lower court decisions had struck down the mandate and the overwhelming majority of conservative and libertarian constitutional law scholars came out against it. If nothing else, liberal commentators could have learned from the lower court decisions upholding the mandate. Without exception, these rulings included long and detailed discussions of the relevant precedent. And most admitted that the case presented novel issues that had not been squarely addressed in previous Supreme Court decisions. These were not the kinds of opinions you typically see in cases that are easily resolved through straightforward application of established precedent.
The Dish 