Scalia’s dissent, at least on first quick perusal, reads like it was originally written as a majority opinion. Back in May, there were rumors floating around relevant legal circles that a key vote was taking place, and that Roberts was feeling tremendous pressure from unidentified circles to vote to uphold the mandate. Did Roberts originally vote to invalidate the mandate on commerce clause grounds, and to invalidate the Medicaid expansion, and then decide later to accept the tax argument and essentially rewrite the Medicaid expansion (which, as I noted, citing Jonathan Cohn, was the sleeper issue in this case) to preserve it?

If so, was he responding to the heat from President Obama and others, preemptively threatening to delegitimize the Court if it invalidated the ACA? The dissent, along with the surprising way that Roberts chose to uphold both the mandate and the Medicaid expansion, will inevitably feed the rumor mill.

I think Jeffrey Toobin was more right than wrong. Ok, I can't actually justify that by what he said but I do think this ruling was a disaster for the left. Advocates of federal power lost everything except the headline. This looks like a stealth overturning of Wickard v. Filburn. The commerce clause expansion that has fueled everything from the New Deal to federal highways to the Great Society to the War on Drugs just took a huge hit.

Furthermore, Congress's power to attach new strings to existing pipelines of federal money just got clipped. This power is used so pervasively that I can't even describe it. Here are a few examples of strings tied to federal buckets of money that were enacted long after the original funding: Title IX (education funds), national drinking age (highway funds), and same sex partner hospital visitation rights (Medicare funds).