d.c., with our political panel and legal experts and before we get to our panel, let s take you through all the possibilities. first, the supreme court could decide the entire law is upheld or they could strike down the entire law. here s where it gets more complicated. the court could strike down just the individual mandate but uphold the rest of the health care law or strike down the individual mandate and pick the health care law apart, including some keyç provisions. for example, covering people with pre-existing conditions and expansion of medicaid. we will know this hour what the justices say and it is worth noting that it could take a little while to dissect what is expected to be a weighty ruling. let me introduce our panel for this hour. chris matthews, host of hard baum. chief foreign affairs correspondent and host of andrea mitchell reports, andrea mitchell. nbc news political director, chuck todd, host of the daily rundown. and the washington post s eugene robinson.
created this ability to get around it the for the tress of the commerce clause. if you take the tax road, you can go around it and achieve the same ends. that is not going to be what a lot of federalism wanted. they view this case as sort of the alamo for states rights, the court has been bleeding federalism for many decades and they wanted a very strong opinion. they play is gotten it on the commerce clause but the court may have also affirmed that you can avoid the commerce clause entirely by basing something on the tax power. so, let s also talk, chris matthews, about what this means for the republicans and the suggestion has been that if this happened and i certainly didn t talk to any republicans in congress over the last month or so who thought that this would be the way the ruling would come down, but there certainly was a lot of thought that if this was upheld, as it has been, thatç e republicans would use it as a rallying cry, that this would
his international airport name of this court, it is the roberts court, a different role, in a sense, historically, than anthony kennedy does, the usual swing vote he is not a swing vote he is the court. this will go down in history as the roberts court that upheld the landmarkç achievement of t obama presidency. so, these two men have a very important and distantive role here. roberts put theis ism prompr.oi it. the roberts court upheld the obama law and these men were have plan particular responsibilities here. i do find it fascinating all of us are trying to wrestle with, why did roberts seize upon this historic role so powerfully here, to leap frog anthony kennedy and to find himself or to place himself with the liberal majority here? he doesn t want this court to be three strikes and you re out.
praising this decision. obviously, as you know, the costin the supreme court has upheld the individual mandate. in addition, when you look at the polls, the specifics of the details of what s in this plan, from covering college students up to age 26, the medicade provision, these are things that are favored by the american people. are the republicans now going to say we fought the good fight, it s over, are you gonna continue to try to fight this through congress? well, a couple thoughts here. number one, i have been telling people, based on my experience and i have had some with the supreme court, if you bet the farm on what conventional wisdom says they are going to adjudicate, you could lose the farm. and i think a lot of people were surprised today that the court ruled the way it did and that justice roberts went with the four left-leaning justices. to get directly to your question, what this does is it puts it back in the hands of the
the court had to say about medicaid. no i haven t, i have been getting bits and pieces in my ear. that would be a significant win if the supreme court said this was an unconstitutional burned on states this is an issue around for decades, these types of man dates from the federal government. the court has pretty much only given lip service in the past them keep on saying it is possible that you are going to cross the line at some pointelle and put a burden on states that would be unconstitutional. what we just heard is correct, the court seems to have buttressed that principle, actually come down and said that the states have to be able to opt-out. that does create a rim affect if that is the case a majority of stays in the court opposing this law. if they had the ability to opt-out, most of them probably would. i don t see how the health care law can survive if the pool is reduced by that amount.