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Well there is great mourning, weeping and gnashing of teeth on the left today...and I love it.  The bloodbath for ObamaCare that took place yesterday at the U.S. Supreme Court is not sitting well with liberals everywhere, and they’re looking for people to blame.  You know, I actually kind of feel bad for the Solicitor General who is representing Obama and the Pelosi Congress and their unconstitutional takeover in this case. 

Because you’re already hearing liberals scapegoating him and saying things like, “He wasn’t prepared!  How could he not be prepared for these questions?!”  Listen friends, you don’t get to the point where you’re arguing before the Supreme Court if you don’t know how to prepare.  You don’t get to be Solicitor General if you aren’t able to handle yourself in a courtroom.  You don’t take on a case as high profile as the ObamaCare constitutionality suit if you aren’t aware of the arguments that are going to be made.

Mr. Verrilli was not the problem yesterday.  The problem for the left was the argument.  The problem for the left was the Constitution.  There’s simply nothing that you can say to some of these points and questions if you are arguing in favor of the left’s statist point of view.  First, Chief Justice Roberts:

CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Well, the same, it seems to me, would be true say for the market in emergency services: police, fire, ambulance, roadside assistance, whatever. You don't know when you're going to need it; you're not sure that you will. But the same is true for health care. You don't know if you're going to need a heart transplant or if you ever will. So there is a market there. To -- in some extent, we all participate in it. So can the government require you to buy a cell phone because that would facilitate responding when you need emergency services? You can just dial 911 no matter where you are...It seems to me that's the same as in my hypothetical. You don't know when you're going to need police assistance. You can't predict the extent to emergency response that you'll need. But when you do, and the government provides it.

It’s an excellent analogy, and indefensible for Mr. Verrilli.  The talking points that work so well on cable television programs don’t work so well in front of the Supreme Court.  Verrilli knows that, so he doesn’t go there – too often.  And here’s why.  He tried it one time in particular and Justice Anthony Kennedy – the “swing vote” that the liberals were counting on siding with them, smacked him down with an incredible statement:

SOLICITOR GENERAL VERRILLI: ...as I read the Court's cases is that the way in which you ensure that the Federal Government stays in its sphere and the sphere reserved for the States is protected is by policing the boundary: Is the national government regulating economic activity with a substantial effect on interstate commerce?

JUSTICE KENNEDY: But the reason, the reason this is concerning, is because it requires the individual to do an affirmative act. In the law of torts our tradition, our law, has been that you don't have the duty to rescue someone if that person is in danger. The blind man is walking in front of a car and you do not have a duty to stop him absent some relation between you. And there is some severe moral criticisms of that rule, but that's generally the rule.

And here the government is saying that the Federal Government has a duty to tell the individual citizen that it must act, and that is different from what we have in previous cases and that changes the relationship of the Federal Government to the individual in the very fundamental way.

That’s a dagger.  Of course, it’s also exactly what conservatives have been saying since this debate began: if the federal government can force you into commerce, simply so they can then regulate your commerce activity, that fundamentally changes the relationship of man to the state.  There’s nothing the government cannot then do to an individual…or require them to do...so long as they claim they are doing it for the “public good.” 

And the liberal response that Verrilli parroted that “not engaging in commerce is a form of commerce because it affects the market” is so expansive that it renders the concept of engaging in commerce meaningless. 

It got so bad, that at one point, even the liberal justices were laughing at Mr. Verrilli’s arguments and his vain attempt to defend the Obama administration’s defense that Congress could punish people for not buying insurance because “it’s a tax.”  This, of course, contradicts the personal Obama defense that it’s not a tax.  Here’s the simple way of looking at it: ObamaCare is a mess, the arguments defending it are a mess, and the country is a mess if it isn’t overturned.