Surprise! It's constitutional

Josh Voorhees has a Slate article about the Supreme Court ruling on health care:

The Affordable Care Act, the landmark legislative achievement of President Obama's first term, will largely stand. Chief Justice John Roberts penned the majority decision: "The framers created a federal government of limited powers, and assigned to this court the duty of enforcing those limits. The court does so today but the court does not express any opinion on wisdom of the Affordable Care Act under the constitution. That judgment is reserved to the people" and "We do not consider whether the Act embodies sound policies. That judgment is entrusted to the nation's elected leaders. We ask only whether Congress has the power under the Constitution to enact the challenged provisions." Joining Roberts in the majority: Elena Kagan, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, and Sonia Sotomayor.Kennedy wrote in the dissent: "In our view, the entire Act before us is invalid in its entirety" and "The Act before us here exceeds federal power both in mandating the purchase of health insurance and in denying non-consenting states all Medicaid funding. These parts of the Act are central to its design and operation, and all the Act's other provisions would not have been enacted without them. In our view it must follow that the entire statute is inoperative." Which means, basically, that if Roberts would have sided with the conservative wing of the court, the entire law would have been thrown out.

Rico says the quote for the day is definitely from the Democratic National Committee's executive director Patrick Gaspard, who had this to say immediately following the news: "It's constitutional, bitches." (Given that all the women on the Court voted for it being constitutional, that's probably not who he meant...)