That would be nice.
It's funny -- my idealism actually survived law school. Despite reading countless cases, including dozens of oft-ugly Constitutional Law cases, I left law school with the feeling that justices generally did their best to interpret the law in accordance with their judicial principles. Although I might disagree strongly with Scalia's principles, I genuinely thought he had some. Starting with Bush v. Gore, the five conservatives on the Supreme Court systematically disabused me of any idealism.
It wasn't just that the case was indefensible on its legal merits (even its semi-defenders, like Judge Richard Posner, didn't try to argue for it on its actual legal reasoning). It's that even if its legal arguments held together, they would have been exactly contrary to everything that the five conservatives had pretended to believe through most of their writings, over the course of their careers. Countless times they'd dodged cases that demanded a liberal outcome by claiming it was a political question, or settling on some failing of standing or other technical reason to decline to hear the case. But on Bush v. Gore they jumped into the fray. Countless times they'd argued the importance of states rights. In Bush v. Gore, they trampled a state's traditional right to manage its own elections. Countless times they'd argued against broad new readings of Constitutional language. In Bush v. Gore they came up with by far the broadest and least precedented reading of Equal Protection in history. Generally they'd fought for judicial minimalism, but in Bush v. Gore they stopped counting with an emergency order then made a ruling that went far beyond what was needed even to implement the supposed principles of law they'd just invented. And they even went so far as to announce it was a one-off ruling, that they warned courts never to think of using again -- a kind of one-time Constitutional principle for the sole benefit of George W. Bush. It was like a giant sign saying "principles don't matter one little bit to us, political outcomes do."
Even after Bush v. Gore, my shredded idealism survived in a traumatized state. I thought it was a one-time bit of insanity. But there were a string of cases like that, culminating in Citizens United, which destroyed those surviving shreds of respect I once had for the institution. Now I see it as nothing but a vehicle for five Republican operatives to legislate matters that the GOP hasn't been able to win in the Congress. So, I fully expect those same Republicans to strike down the individual mandate. It doesn't matter that there's absolutely no honest legal argument for striking it down. It just matters that the GOP feels strongly about it and lost in the Congress, so the five traitors on the bench will step in and impose the party's political will on the nation.
