Could the Supreme Court's ObamaCare ruling sink the tea party?

The legal logic behind the mandate is more direct: The enumerated power in the health care case is the Commerce Clause; the mandate is a “necessary and proper” part of the unquestionably constitutional regulation of the nearly 20 percent of our nation’s economy that is the health care industry.

For Roberts and Scalia, it wouldn’t be that big a leap from Raich and Comstock to upholding health care reform. This isn’t to say they would have to like the law as a matter of policy.

Indeed, Sutton, while voting to uphold the constitutionality of the mandate in the court of appeals, made pretty clear that while he thought the law was plainly constitutional, he wasn’t necessarily crazy about it as a matter of policy.

Nonetheless, a rejection of the tea party’s basic constitutional vision by the Supreme Court—especially if a ruling upholding the mandate were joined by conservatives like Scalia and Roberts—would strike a major blow to tea partiers’ ability to have their constitutional theories taken seriously by the American public.