Bull Fighting, SCOTUS-Style

Buzzfeed's Ben Smith posts this "argument" as to how a 5-4 decision to overturn the entire Affordable Care Act would be justified:

We aren’t being asked to radically revise the Commerce Clause and throw out seven decades of law, and we won’t. But we know the founders never intended the Commerce Clause to allow the Federal Government to regulate everything on the planet. So we are going to accept Randy Barnett’s basically spurious exception to that basically spurious idea, and throw out the Affordable Care Act on the grounds that the Commerce Clause regulates “activity” (which we don’t really believe), but not “inactivity” (because, why not draw the line somewhere?).

In other words, the Court's conservatives won't specifically say that the Commerce Clause itself (and the last 70 years of law predicated upon it) is complete bull, just that the lynchpin of the ACA (the individual mandate) is.  Ergo,  they'll use a complete bull argument to overturn what they believe is a complete bull law.

Like Ed Kilgore says, if that's the case it's clear what the next steps would be:

Under this construction, of course, the Court wouldn’t admit what it was actually doing, but would embrace the “spurious exception” in order to avoid a direct reversal of the “spurious doctrine.” But it would definitely burrow into the foundations of the “fantasy mansion” in a way that would make it relatively easy for a future, more radically conservative Court—say, the kind that might exist after eight years of a Romney administration—to “throw out seven decades of law,” and with it, the underpinnings of seven decades of social progress, including such minor items as the Civil Rights Act of 1964. 

Better hope the Dems are in a position to stop it, and in the White House.