Just a moment ago, it seems, President Obama’s supporters were assailing the John Roberts Court for its supposed political activism. Now, Roberts has given Obamacare’s supporters their sweetest victory precisely because he did the political work that Obama and his allies wouldn’t, or couldn’t, do when they were enacting the health-care overhaul in 2010—calling the “mandate” undergirding the law what it actually is, a tax.

In the blistering oven outside the Supreme Court Thursday morning, two skimpily clad, bespangled young women calling themselves “belly dancers for single payer” shook their booties, while a male companion pounded a beledi drum and another one played a flutelike instrument called a mizmar.

Women have much to celebrate in today’s historic Supreme Court ruling upholding the Affordable Care Act—starting with the fact that it means an end to gender discrimination in the health-insurance market. In other words, women will no longer pay up to 150 percent more than men for the exact same health benefits.

Conservatives shouldn’t pretend that the Supreme Court decision on the Affordable Care Act isn’t a victory for President Obama. It is, and the president will naturally claim vindication for his policies.But for Obama, today’s judgment amounts to a victory in a battle, not the war.

This is a bittersweet day for our Constitution and the system of federalism it established. First the sweet: today the Supreme Court reaffirmed that Article I of the Constitution does provide limits on the powers of Congress that are enforceable in the courts.

The sidewalk in front of the Supreme Court looked a bit like a carnival Thursday morning, as competing chants rang out.“Hey, hey, ho, ho. Obamacare has got to go!” was one cry.A man in a Revolutionary War hat waved a sign that said, “Don’t Tread on Me.

In Washington the most important question surrounding the Supreme Court’s Obamacare decision is not how the ruling will impact the health care of millions of Americans. Nor is it about the implications of the decision for the future of the high court.

As the Senate was considering his nomination to become this nation's 17th chief justice, John Roberts—once a star pupil in my constitutional law class—famously compared the role of a judge with that of an umpire, just calling the balls and strikes.

The cases are 209 years apart, but just below the surface, the similarities between Marbury v. Madison, the landmark Supreme Court case establishing judicial review, and today’s decision upholding the health-care law’s individual mandate are striking.

The Supreme Court, with today's decision on the Affordable Care Act, has decided that we all are grown-ups and can hear the true facts of life and death. They realized that health care is not just another commodity, but is, like death and taxes, a requirement.

Stunning. There’s just no other way to say it. John Roberts, the fifth liberal? Actually, the decision gets a little more complicated than that in its details, but the bottom line is the bottom line: the Supreme Court upheld the individual mandate—upheld the law pretty much in full.

Perhaps it was part of Mitt Romney’s coping strategy, or perhaps the beginning of his lengthy retort to an unfavorable decision. Within 30 minutes of the Supreme Court ruling to uphold much of President Obama’s health-care law, the Romney campaign announced it had raised more than $100,000.

The Obama administration has survived a train wreck.We’re not so sure about the media.During the Supreme Court’s oral arguments over Obamacare in March, CNN’s legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin famously said this: “This was a train wreck for the Obama administration.

The Republican Plan B is to repeal Obamacare on Day 1 of a Romney presidency.Good luck with that.First, today's Supreme Court decision will make it a lot harder to elect Mitt Romney. President Obama has just been handed a fearsome election weapon.

As I predicted, my day lilies are still blooming beautifully, I'm still married to the love of my life, and the Commissars do not seem to have started liquidating the kulaks yet.  Obviously, I would have preferred this decision to go the other way.

Damn you, John Roberts. Sure, by joining the court's four liberals in upholding President Obama's Affordable Care Act, you have preserved a law that will protect tens of millions of Americans with preexisting conditions.

It’s easy to see why liberals are relieved today: the most important progressive legislation of most of our lifetimes has survived. It’s easy to see why centrists are relieved: the Supreme Court’s legitimacy has survived. Centrists understand that it’s not a good thing for an ostensibly nonpartisan institution like the Supreme Court to be at war with one of America’s two major parties.

My friend Laurence Tribe, the nation’s leading constitutional scholar who once had a student named John Roberts in his Harvard Law School class, had predicted the outcome.In the face of the overwhelming consensus that the Supreme Court would strike down the individual mandate at the heart of health reform, Tribe has repeatedly said the issue was clear and the Court did not even need to reach the question of whether the mandate was a proper exercise of Congressional power over interstate commerce.

It was a moment of truth for John Roberts, a longtime pillar of the Washington legal establishment, a member of the ultra-posh Chevy Chase Club, and someone who acquaintances say cares deeply about how he is portrayed in the press.