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" Photo Illustration by Donkey Hotey via Flickr/Special to The Politics BlogFAR FROM BRAIN SURGERY /// In Tuesday&amp;#039;s oral arguments on the mandate, Scalia spoke of broccoli and men, Sotomayor ran the old Bush hands ragged, and the grand defender of &amp;quot;Obamacare&amp;quot; had a no-good terrible day. The whole thing is at best 50-50. (CLICK HERE FOR MORE WITH THE PROTESTORS FROM THE COURT STEPS.) WASHINGTON \u2014 The daily spin session here on the Supreme Court steps, wherein all the people lucky enough to get inside to hear the actual arguments come out and explain to all the rest of us what in the hell is going on, is one of the oddest professional experiences of my life. First of all, from the outside, there is absolutely no way of knowing whether or not the Court has decided to chuck the whole business and convert itself into a chorus line. Then, the people inside come outside, and you realize that a lot of their time has been spent reading facial expressions, judging body language, and trying to discern from an inflection or the emphasis on a single question, which way one judge may be leaning, and how that will affect all the facial expressions, body language, inflections, and emphasis of the court as a whole. It&amp;#039;s like being a peasant, waiting at the bottom of some marble steps to hear what the high priests saw in the entrails of a bird. The whole thing is a matter of handicapping the invisible, of making book on the unknown. Here&amp;#039;s what I was best able to glean.... Antonin Scalia is hopeless. He&amp;#039;s going to vote to throw this law into the Potomac, and his fellow justices after it, if needs be. He apparently began his question with an arcane discussion of whether or not the Affordable Care Act impinges somehow on state sovereignty, which is one of his favorite little tin drums and, if he&amp;#039;s decided to bang on it, knowing that he&amp;#039;s the only one that even cares about the point, that means he&amp;#039;s pretty much decided on the real issues already. Scalia also apparently was fairly enthusiastic about &amp;quot;the broccoli argument,&amp;quot; a popular one among the Tea Party set out on the sidewalk. (More on that whole scene right here.) If the government can make you buy health insurance, goes the argument, then why can&amp;#039;t it make you buy broccoli? Even as a talk-radio trope, this is obviously a case of comparing apples and andirons. That a Supreme Court justice actually took it seriously enough to bring it up during oral arguments is pretty solid evidence that his mind is made up and he is now indulging in that uniquely Nino sense of fun. The liberal bloc is holding firm. Apparently, Justice Stephen Breyer, a onetime aide to the late Senator Edward Kennedy, who spent his entire career in the Senate trying to get universal health care established in the United States, was particularly engaged on his old boss&amp;#039;s signature issue, and Justice Sonia Sotomayor was tough on Michael Carvin, the old Bush recount hand, on the alleged similarities between the way health care is financed now, and the way it will be financed under the Affordable Care Act. Carvin was arguing that the binary argument of the supporters of the act that the alternative to the ACA is heaving sick people into the street is belied by the current system whereby anyone can get treated in an emergency room. Sotomayor ran him a bit ragged on that point. The opposition has better lawyers. The consensus among the escapees was that Solictor General Donald Verrilli had a pretty bad, terrible, awful day and that Paul Clement, arguing against the mandate, was the best lawyer in the room. (Verrilli got mired in a terrible mess when Justice Samuel Alito got him talking about why health-insurance was different than burial insurance.) Six months ago, you couldn&amp;#039;t get a bet on the board that the individual mandate would be struck down. At the moment, the whole thing is at best 50-50, with Chief Justice John Roberts and the inevitably dithering Anthony Kennedy holding the pivotal votes. It is said that, in the wake of Bush v. Gore, which was before his time, and Citizens United, which is his own court&amp;#039;s primary albatross at the moment, that Roberts might be wary of saddling the court&amp;#039;s reputation with yet another revolutionary ruling on a highly politicized case. Kennedy, it is said, was both troubled by what he may see as congressional overreach in creating the mandate, and simultaneously intrigued by the notion that health-insurance is a unique industry producing a unique product. Thus, the whole future of health-care reform in America may come down to whether Anthony Kennedy is more intrigued than he is troubled....  MORE FROM THE SCENE: On Supreme Court Steps, a Health-Care Dream Deferred CLICK HERE FOR COMPLETE LIVE COVERAGE FROM THE SUPREME COURT &amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a13412/supreme-court-health-care-mandate-ruling-7650460/>