Toobin: Mandate 'Doomed'

JEFFREY TOOBIN: Well, Charlie, this was yet another astonishing day in the courtroom, because the big issue of the day was so-called severability, which means if the individual mandate is struck down, does the rest of the affordable care act go with it? And the takeaway I had from that argument is the individual mandate looks pretty doomed to me, because Anthony Kennedy—so often the swing vote, clearly, I think—the swing vote here was asking question after question based on the assumption that the court would strike down the individual mandate, and even more incredibly to me, he and several other justices were raising the serious possibility that the rest of the law would go with it. Thousands of pages of law, some of it clearly constitutional, and not even that controversial. That may go with it, according to at least some of the justices and maybe a majority.