*Supreme Court repeal of health care looks like a good bet on Intrade

At last check the online betting site had the chances of repealing the individual mandate at only 51 percent. That seems fairly low in light of the tough questioning this morning by four of the five justices likely to overturn this key portion of the health care legislation. From the NYT:

The conventional view is that the administration will need one of those four votes to win, and it was not clear that it had captured one. The court's four more liberal members - Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan - indicated that they supported the law, as expected. Justice Clarence Thomas, who asked no questions, is thought likely to vote to strike down the law. Everything about the argument was outsized. It was, at two hours, twice the usual length. The questioning was, even by the standards of the garrulous current court, unusually intense and pointed. And the atmosphere in the courtroom, which is generally subdued, was electric.

Skeptical questioning isn't always a predictor of where the vote will go, but often times it is. And that raises all sorts of worrisome questions about the federal government's authority to regulate commerce, writes Michael Kinsley in the LAT:

Now, maybe the court has been wrong all this time. Maybe the federal government's authority under the commerce clause is much narrower. Maybe that authority doesn't extend to requiring individual citizens to have health insurance or pay a fine. But if so, it is not only the future of "Obamacare" that will suddenly be shaky. Every piece of legislation for about the last 70 years that rested on the commerce clause will suddenly be up for grabs. This includes the Civil Rights Act. It includes laws protecting the environment and consumers. Basically anything the government does that has ever been justified by the commerce clause will be open to challenge. For the sake of their own sanity and summer recesses, the justices ought to proceed cautiously.

*Legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin says overturning the individual mandate is practically a done deal. From TPM:

"This was a train wreck for the Obama administration," he said. "This law looks like it's going to be struck down. I'm telling you, all of the predictions including mine that the justices would not have a problem with this law were wrong... if I had to bet today I would bet that this court is going to strike down the individual mandate." Toobin added that he felt that U.S. Solicitor General David Verrilli simply wasn't prepared for the conservative justices. "I don't know why he had a bad day," he said. "He is a good lawyer, he was a perfectly fine lawyer in the really sort of tangential argument yesterday. He was not ready for the answers for the conservative justices." Toobin also said he thought Justice Kennedy, the perennial swing vote, was a "lost cause" for supporters of the health care reform law.