Legal Challenges

Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign argued Monday the individual mandate is a penalty, not a tax.

Quayle would add an amendment that says no law can be considered a tax unless Congress designates it as a tax.

Legal circles have been buzzing since Thursday with speculation Roberts might have initially sided with the court’s conservatives.

The Supreme Court’s healthcare ruling upended conventional wisdom and expert predictions at nearly every turn.

President Obama has outraised Mitt Romney since the Supreme Court affirmed the healthcare law, Obama's campaign claimed Friday, but it did not give the fundraising numbers.

Obama campaign press secretary Ben LaBolt called the Romney campaign's attempts to tout its fundraising dollars "perverse."

"It's perverse that Mitt Romney won't share details about what he'd do for the millions he'd leave uninsured or at the whims of insurance companies when he 'kills Obamacare dead,' but he'll share the hourly details of his fundraising after the Supreme Court ruling," LaBolt wrote in an email statement. "We've outraised the Romney campaign in that time period but that's not the point — our supporters are more committed than ever to ensuring that insurance companies can't drop coverage for people who get sick or discriminate against people with preexisting conditions by reelecting the President."

But LaBolt did not offer specific numbers for the campaign's fundraising totals.

The Romney campaign, meanwhile, circulated an email Friday afternoon bragging it had raised $4.6 million from more than 47,000 separate donations in the aftermath of the court's decision. 

Campaign spokeswoman Andrea Saul also noted that Romney had added three times as many new Facebook fans as Obama over the period following the ruling, and she said more Romney supporters were engaging with content on his page.

Louisiana's governor said he worries Thursday's healthcare decision will open the door to the government dictating lifestyle choices.

While headlines over the past 24 hours have been dominated by talk of the Supreme Court's decision on the Affordable Care Act, healthcare concerns don't rank high for many Americans when asked about the most important problem facing the nation.

Just 6 percent of Americans said healthcare reform was their top concern, according to a poll released Friday by Gallup, significantly trailing the economy, jobs, deficit and concern about the government.

But that number could spike now that healthcare reform is back front and center in the national political debate. Republicans said Thursday that they would frame November's election as a referendum on Obama's healthcare law.

A new survey partially conducted in the aftermath of the decision to uphold President Obama's signature healthcare law shows that 35 percent of Americans think the U.S. Supreme Court is doing a "good" or "excellent" job. 

Conversely, 22 percent of likely voters surveyed say the court is doing a "poor" job, and 39 percent describe the court as having shown a "fair" performance, according to a survey released Friday by Rasmussen.

The performance ratings had spiked in early April, following oral arguments in the healthcare reform case. At that time, 41 percent of Americans said the court was doing a "good" or "excellent" job, likely the result of either optimism the unpopular bill would be overturned, or simply increased media attention on the inner workings of the judicial branch.

President Obama's campaign harked back to Vice President Biden's "big f--king deal" comment in celebrating the healthcare reform ruling on Thursday. 

"Still a BFD," reads a text from Obama's official Twitter feed linking to T-shirts available in the campaign store. The $30 shirts read, "Health reform still a BFD."

Obama, Pelosi and the SCOTUSblog are among the winners; congressional Republicans are among the losers.