IF BUSH DID THIS, IT WOULD BE PROOF THAT HE WAS A DUMB COWBOY: White House Tweets About Girl With “Congenial Disease,” Tries To Delete It, But Too Late.

BREAKING THE CHAINS of ignorance and despotism.

MAURICE STUCKE: Looking At The Monopsony In The Mirror.

“SHAME ON YOU, BARACK OBAMA:” Romney Ad Uses Footage of Hillary Accusing Obama of Running Deceptive Ads.

GREEN POLITICS: Fisker Loan Spurs More Questions From Senators. “Fisker Automotive and its pending federal government loan has spurred a letter from two U.S. senators to Energy Secretary Steven Chu questioning the appropriateness of the loan, The Detroit News reports. In their letter to Chu, senators John Thune (R-South Dakota) and Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) reportedly question the $529 million loan in part because of Qatar’s ownership stake in the plug-in hybrid automaker. The senators also inquired about the loan earmarked for Fisker partner A123 Systems, the company whose batteries have been subject to a recall.”

DOES THE TAX CLAUSE GIVE CONGRESS unlimited power?

THE HILL: High Court Gives GOP New Weapon On Taxes. “Republicans have seized on the Supreme Court’s decision that the health insurance mandate is a tax, believing it will help them argue a second term for President Obama would be devastating for the economy.”

UPDATE: IowaHawk: “The last time Democrats gloated this hard after a health care victory, they lost 60 House seats.”

ANOTHER UPDATE: A reader emails: “Hi Glenn. Just wanted to let you that I just went on the Romney site to donate money and it is going reaaalll slow. I’m at work and we have a huge, superfast connection so it’s not on my end. Is it possible his donation website is getting swamped with too many people trying to give donations?”

It’s possible.

WALTER RUSSELL MEAD: Biggest Winner in Healthcare Decision: The Founders. “I don’t think the health care policy we’ve adopted is a particularly good one, but at least our institutions more or less worked. . . . Compare all this with Europe, where there are no institutions that are capable of coming to grips with the currency question. Meeting after meeting is held, no real agreement is reached. Neither the EU Parliament nor the Commission nor the heads of government meeting in summits has the power or a method to decide. Europe is trying to write a constitution even as it works desperately to stave off an economic collapse.”

AT AMAZON, Summer Grilling Essentials.

Also, today only: Save up to 25% on InStep Safari Jogging Strollers.

HERE’S A COOL VIDEO BY BILL WHITTLE about my The Higher Education Bubble.

MICKEY KAUS: Who Says Romney Won’t Be Able To Repeal ObamaCare?

INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY: It’s Now Up To Voters To Throw Out The ObamaCare Mess.

YA THINK? WaPo: Health Care Ruling Motivates Romney Supporters.

MARK TAPSCOTT: Roberts Is Not The Goat In Supreme Court Decision.

After reading and stewing about it all day, I’ve concluded that what Roberts has done is fundamentally shift the constitutional debate away from the liberal assumption since the Woodrow Wilson era that an Imperial Presidency and supine Congress can pretty much do as they please so long as it’s covered by at least one of those fig leaves known as the General Welfare, Necessary and Proper or Commerce clauses of the Constitution.

The new assumption is, thanks to Roberts, that at least two of those clauses in fact cannot simply be dragooned into the service of whatever a passing majority in Congress wants to do. And having shifted the meaning of those two clauses, courts will likely now have to view the other clause differently as well.

In other words, the Constitution means something today that it didn’t yesterday, at least in terms of constitutional precedent. It’s not a grand rout of liberalism from the field of battle, but the correlation of constitutional forces has now shifted under their feet in such a way that they must go over to the defensive on ground not of their choosing.

Well, let’s hope. Related: Paul Rahe: An Act of Great Cunning.

Also: Some encouraging thoughts from George Will.

By persuading the court to reject a Commerce Clause rationale for a president’s signature act, the conservative legal insurgency against Obamacare has won a huge victory for the long haul. This victory will help revive a venerable tradition of America’s political culture, that of viewing congressional actions with a skeptical constitutional squint, searching for congruence with the Constitution’s architecture of enumerated powers. By rejecting the Commerce Clause rationale, Thursday’s decision reaffirmed the Constitution’s foundational premise: Enumerated powers are necessarily limited because, as Chief Justice John Marshall said, “the enumeration presupposes something not enumerated.”

When Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), asked where the Constitution authorized the mandate, exclaimed, “Are you serious? Are you serious?,” she was utterly ingenuous. People steeped in Congress’s culture of unbridled power find it incomprehensible that the Framers fashioned the Constitution as a bridle. Now, Thursday’s episode in the continuing debate about the mandate will reverberate to conservatism’s advantage.

It will be so, if people make it so. Also, read this, from John Hinderaker.

UPDATE: Shikha Dalmia: “This ruling should put to rest the idiotic notion that conservative jurists are ideologically driven, partisan hacks who never seriously consider the other side’s argument. ObamaCare opponents had a lock only on one justice going in: Clarence Thomas. Who else they might muster was always up in the air given that the conservative justices try to balance multiple competing concerns: originalism; stare decisis; judicial modesty; the court’s legitimacy…yada, yada, yada. Kennedy, who votes often with the liberal wing of the court, was regarded as the most likely swing vote. That Roberts cast that vote on a case of such huge importance to conservatives and libertarians suggests that he is even less easy to pigeonhole ideologically.”

That will not stop the usual hack-pundits and politicians from saying the same thing in the next big case. It’s a way of working the refs, and sometimes it works. Notice nobody ever blames the Court’s four liberals for voting as a bloc.

GUESS WHO’S back in court today? I think they’re going to get tired of seeing him there.

DAVID GREGORY ON OBAMACARE: “I’m not sure the White House wants to own it.”

UPDATE: President Pyrrhus? “Keeping Obamacare alive means Mitt Romney still has this unpopular plan to campaign against, including the individual mandate, the most unpopular part (60 percent of Americans oppose it). Do you really think turning the mandate from a government edict to a massive tax hike will make it more popular? . . . Any chance of Democrats taking back the House are dead. The odds of the GOP picking up the Senate just improved. And Romney’s got a fired-up base ready for November. Now imagine what would have happened if Obama- care had lost: Obama’s base would be pumped up, while Romney would be forced to spend the next four months explaining his health care plans.”

UPDATE: Ann Althouse:

“It is not our job to protect the people from the consequences of their political choices.”

That’s the quote from Roberts’ opinion that he extracted up front as he began the announcement of the opinion today. . . .

This calls to mind the old Pelosi quote: “But we have to pass the bill so that you can find out what is in it.”

We found out today, I think. Have you noticed yet?

Indeed.

MIKE GRAETZ ON THE TAX DODGE:

Interestingly, the four dissenters did not claim that imposing such a tax on the failure to purchase health insurance would be unconstitutional. Instead they relied on the constitutional significance of Congress calling the fee a penalty, not a tax. Justice Roberts insisted that this Congressional label was not relevant in assessing the provision’s constitutionality. In a twist, however, Justice Roberts held that the congressional label was determinative in deciding whether the Anti-Injunction Act—a statute which bars lawsuits challenging taxes before the time for their collection—applied, a holding with which the four dissenters agreed. So, the Court decided that even though the provision is a tax for interpreting the Constitution, it is not a tax for interpreting the Anti-Injunction statute. Around Congress, it has often been said about taxes that “if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it is a duck.” Today, poultry just became far easier to identify than a “tax.”

Plus this from Joe Kristan:

Maybe the most depressing aspect of the decision is the way it seems to endorse using the tax law as the Swiss Army Knife of public policy. Things that Congress can’t enact any other way are now possible if they can somehow be crammed into the tax law. The tax code is already groaning under its load of responsibilities for industrial policy, health policy, welfare policy and housing policy, for starters. The IRS Commissioner is now sort of a super cabinet member with a portfolio that dwarfs most of the “real” cabinet departments. Of course, the IRS is ill-suited to this role, resulting in poor policy administration and poor tax administration. Thanks, Justice Roberts!

More commentary at the link.

OUR CLASSY RULING CLASS: Dem’s Sexist Slurs At ObamaCare Opponents.