Supreme Court Preview

Right now, I'd give 3:5 odds that the crazy conservatives will overturn the individual mandate in spite of more than 70 years of precedent and in spite of, or more likely, because of the Pandora's Box of issues relating to federal regulation.  Actually, according to Tom Perriello, this fight goes much deeper than the New Deal:

This vision of a tiny, powerless central government has always been at odds with the U.S. Constitution, a document our nation's founders wrote explicitly to reject and replace the Articles of Confederation. George Washington once wrote that the weakness of the Articles, which lacked the Constitution's power to tax and spend for the general welfare, almost cost us the Revolutionary War. Disconnected and self-interested, the states struggled to harness the unity and cooperation necessary to defeat a world superpower.
The Founders addressed this by writing a Constitution that empowered America to "legislate in all cases for the general interests of the Union." Since the Constitution's creation, American leaders have enjoyed the power necessary to solve national problems, whether those problems were a Depression in the 1930s, a system of racial apartheid in the 1960s, or a costly and inadequate healthcare system in 2010.
But the Confederate legacy also lives on. As Elizabeth Wydra of the Constitutional Accountability Center notes, "The Tea Party's version of the Constitution has far more in common with the failed Articles of Confederation ... than with our actual, enduring U.S. Constitution." The Articles famously lacked our Constitution's commerce power. Similarly, the Confederate Constitution stripped the federal government's authority to "provide for the ... general welfare," from provisions relating to taxation and eviscerated the interstate commerce clause. These limitations would have likely doomed not only the Affordable Care Act, but also major federal programs such as Medicare and Social Security.

Unfortunately, as in the Citizens United case, it probably won't take long for the chickens to come home to roost if the radical activist Republican justices turn to revisionist history in their decision.  Hopefully, they will listen to the numerous more sensible Republicans on this one (I can't believe I typed that).  Actually, this case, more than anything else, might separate sensible Republicans from the nutjobs in charge.