Blunt endorsed Mitt Romney early on and led the campaign’s efforts to recruit Republican lawmakers during the GOP primary. But his comments in an interview on KTRS radio in St. Louis may give Boston some heartburn as it tries to convince conservative voters that Romney, who enacted the predecessor of Obamacare in Massachusetts, will actually repeal the healthcare law.

“It’s one of the things that I think should continue to be the case,” Blunt said of the “dependent coverage” provision, explaining that “it’s a way to get a significant number of the uninsured into an insurance group without much cost,” because young people are generally healthy.

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The healthcare industry makes up 16 percent of our economy. Yet even in these days of close to 10 percent unemployment, we do not invest enough money in our young people to train them for jobs in healthcare — an already understaffed industry that will have to serve an additional 32 million people once the provisions of the 2010 health-reform law take full effect. Instead, when faced with pressure from hospitals and nursing homes for more healthcare workers, the federal government grants visas to import nurses, physicians, pharmacists, physical therapists, and many other types of healthcare workers from countries that can ill afford to lose them.

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Obama said that the court overturning Congress' healthcare reform law would be a textbook example of "judicial activism" as "conservative commentators" define it: "that an unelected group of people would somehow overturn a duly constituted and passed law." And hey, that seems like an eminently defensible and not particularly unsettling point! Conservatives made "judicial activism" into a talking point and rallying cry and defined it vaguely enough to encompass judges striking down basically any law or statute.

Marcus, though, is stopped cold.

And yet, Obama’s assault on “an unelected group of people” stopped me cold. Because, as the former constitutional law professor certainly understands, it is the essence of our governmental system to vest in the court the ultimate power to decide the meaning of the constitution. Even if, as the president said, it means overturning “a duly constituted and passed law.”

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My boy spent 65 days in the pediatric intensive care unit (PICU) at one of Northern California’s best hospitals; during that time he underwent two brain surgeries, along with operations to insert a tracheostomy and a feeding tube. We stayed with him 24 hours a day, my husband, Alan, and I, his grandparents, and his 16-year-old brother, watching his oxygen levels on a screen, tracking his heart rate in beats per minute. The doctors kept him sedated, but every morning they turned down the propofol (Michael Jackson’s drug of choice) when the neurosurgeons came to do their examination. Three to five doctors circled Mason’s bed, one of them yelled his name into his ear. When he didn’t wake up right away, they apologetically pinched him and yelled louder.

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It’s great that you’re deriving intellectual pleasure from debating Obamacare. I love that this theoretical dance you’re engaged in has no repercussions to you, a healthy individual. I would love to join you some evening for a spirited discussion on the pros and cons of healthcare reform. Maybe over a glass of wine? Heck -- over two or three glasses of wine. I’d love to lean forward, my arched brows furrowed, my full lips purple with the stain of a good Zinfandel, and throw out statistics and well-crafted one-liners about the plight of the uninsured, the underinsured, the sick. Those poor, poor sick.

But I can’t.

I can’t because it isn’t theoretical. I am sick. I’m so sick I can’t drink. I can’t drink and I can’t eat half the things a normal person eats and when I hear the word “Obamacare” hissed in snide derision I want to put a golf club through the windshield of the nearest Mercedes-Benz.

I’m 33 years old. I was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease called ulcerative colitis when I was 26.

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One needs to keep that distinction in mind when one reads CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin’s now-notorious statement Tuesday on CNN:  “This law looks like it’s going to be struck down. I’m telling you, all of the predictions, including mine, that the justices would not have a problem with this law were wrong. I think this law is in grave, grave trouble.”

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The severability issue presupposes that the Court is going to accept the stupid arguments against the mandate. If it does, the Court must decide how much of the rest of the statute has to be struck down as well? The answer depends on how much of it Congress would have passed had it known it could not enact the mandate. The Obama administration claims that if the Court strikes down the mandate that individuals purchase insurance, it must also invalidate the prohibition against insurers discriminating against people with preexisting conditions, and the law’s limitations on how insurers can set rates. Its opponents want to throw out the whole thing. The Court had to appoint a lawyer itself in order to hear arguments that the rest of the law could work without the mandate, because there are other mechanisms, such as subsidies, to encourage young, healthy people to buy insurance.

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As the justices debate constitutionality of the legislation, we want to know how the law is affecting regular Americans. Has the Affordable Care Act changed you or your family's healthcare experience?

Blog about it on Open Salon -- and we may feature your story on Salon.

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Even as liberals worry that the justices will strike down healthcare reform, conservatives like Rose are preparing to keep up the fight in case the Court upholds it. If Obamacare stands, she says activists will take to the streets, the courts, the voting booth and the halls of Congress much in the way they have fought legal abortion.

Rose’s invocation of Roe as a parable for Obamacare is emblematic of conservative confusion and hypocrisy when it comes to the law. Roe enshrined a woman’s right to be free from interference from the government in choosing an abortion — a medical procedure. Yet the right to be free from government “tyranny,” as Tea Party activists call it, is the same principle that animates conservative opposition to imagined “government bureaucrats” writing the rules on access to care. You wouldn’t want the government telling you what to do with your body, would you?

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Is there anything to say before that? I was going to hold my tongue, until I heard Michele Bachmann compare the individual mandate to the government requiring you to buy broccoli or join a gym – and then heard some of the conservative justices echo the same lame talking points. The kind interpretation is that the justices don't know how the health care market works any better than most reporters do, so they're grasping for ways to understand it. The unkind interpretation is that the conservative intellectual machine that helped produce Antonin Scalia (a Federalist Society alum) churns out talking points that are now parroted not just by unblinking zealots like Bachmann, but at the highest level of government.

The other point the questioning made clear is that ironically, Democrats borrowed the most constitutionally questionable aspect of the ACA from Republicans. It's rich to hear the plaintiffs' attorneys object to throwing Americans into the rapacious insurance-industry maw. Folks on the left had the same objection when the law was being debated.

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A lot of arguments have been made against the mandate, but we can roughly group them into two broad categories, which I’ll call 1) No Limits and 2) I Am a Rock.  No Limits claims that if the mandate is permitted, there will be no limitations on federal power. I Am a Rock claims that people have a constitutional right to some safe harbor where they and (more important) their money are immune from all federal regulation.

The No Limits argument was succinctly stated by Justice Kennedy:  “Can you create commerce in order to regulate it?” He worried that “this is a step beyond what our cases have allowed, the affirmative duty to act to go into commerce.”  Roberts worried that government could force you to buy a cellphone; Alito, burial services; Scalia, broccoli.

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Some caution is warranted: How the Court will ultimately rule is not yet set in stone. The questions asked don't always signify what action a justice will take, and all that is required is for just one conservative member of the court to join the four more liberal-minded justices for the law to survive. But for the moment, a sense of dismay is spreading quickly through the community of Obamacare supporters. Many sharp legal minds on the left believed that the Court was unlikely to strike down the mandate, to the point that one could almost smell the complacency. As of noon on Tuesday, that complacency is gone.

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Behind all this is the brute fact that if the Court decides the individual mandate is an unconstitutional extension of federal authority, the entire law starts unraveling.

But with a bit of political jujitsu, the president could turn any such defeat into a victory for a single-payer healthcare system – Medicare for all.

Here’s how.

The dilemma at the heart of the new law is that it continues to depend on private health insurers, who have to make a profit or at least pay all their costs including marketing and advertising.

Yet the only way private insurers can afford to cover everyone with pre-existing health problems, as the new law requires, is to have every American buy health insurance – including young and healthier people who are unlikely to rack up large healthcare costs.

This dilemma is the product of political compromise. You’ll remember the administration couldn’t get the votes for a single-payer system such as Medicare for all. It hardly tried. Not a single Republican would even agree to a bill giving Americans the option of buying into it.

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And that’s why it is unlikely that the Court will accept Monday’s invitation to throw the whole case out on jurisdictional grounds, without ever reaching the merits. Before a court can hear any case, it has to decide whether it has the authority to do it. The central challenge in the case is to the ACA’s “mandate,” which deducts a penalty from the tax refunds of persons who go without health insurance. Monday morning’s oral argument in the Court focused on an obscure statute called the Anti-Injunction Act of 1867, which states that “no suit for the purpose of restraining the assessment or collection of any tax shall be maintained in any court by any person.” Several lower court judges have concluded that this language means no one can challenge the ACA until they have paid the penalty. That would delay the litigation for years, since no penalties will be collected until 2015.

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The stakes are huge. Some of the arguments that the challengers are making would call into question the entire modern administrative state. Recent years have seen many bitterly divided, 5-4 conservative activist decisions overturning social welfare legislation – banning affirmative action, the Violence Against Women Act, cutting back on the reach of the Voting Rights Act – but this would be the biggest of all. On the other hand, because only Clarence Thomas has endorsed a radical reshaping of the law like the one ACA's challengers argue for, it is entirely possible that the bill will be upheld by an 8-1 margin.

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The Weekly Standard’s Jeffrey Anderson and William Kristol cite that paper to argue that Barack Obama should be doomed – and that Republicans should support Rick Santorum over Mitt Romney because Santorum would be best able to campaign on the issue. Indeed, one would think that the most important, and perhaps most controversial, piece of legislation passed during Barack Obama’s term would have direct, significant effects on his chance for reelection. But that’s almost certainly not the case, and Republicans would be foolish to base their nomination on Anderson and Kristol’s advice.

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What hasn’t been reported yet are two conference calls in June and December 2010 in which Gingrich and his for-profit Center for Health Transformation touted "the good parts" of Obama's plan and offered advice about how clients might take advantage of a myriad of provisions of the Affordable Care Act.

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