To the people who cover Washington, we call it chroniclingsituational immorality. Not since Bush v. Gore have weseen madness that could compare to this week's Supreme Court debateover the constitutionality of the healthcare reform law.

While the arguments went on inside, for three straight daysthousands of people with all kinds of placards milled around theperimeter. Their efforts were not aimed at swaying the justices butin ensuring that they could go home feeling that everyone knewtheir opinion.

The proceedings this week are of similar hyperbole. The keyissue, in the minds of opponents of the bill, is the provision inthe Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act that requireseveryone to buy insurance or pay a penalty.

During the debate on the issue, Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., calledsuch a provision “an assault on liberty;” he and his Republicancohorts assailed the provision as “un-American.”

Noting the second anniversary of its passage 10 days or so ago,Rep. Allen West, R-Fla., a Tea Party member, called it a “failure,”citing “skyrocketing healthcare premiums, putting patient choiceunder fire, putting retirement security in jeopardy, and resultingin costs spiraling out of control.”

While opponents have called it “Obamacare” and blamed it onPresident Obama and Democrats in every vicious term imaginable, thefact is that the bill as written by the Senate that became lawincorporates mostly Republican ideas dating from 1989.

Moreover, while Republican senators have been busily distancingthemselves from it, reporters who covered the actual writing of thebill watched as Republican senators played as great a role as–and,in many cases, greater than–the Democrats.

At the same time, the armchair legal analysts have decided–51percent to 49 percent, according to a Kaiser Healthcare survey–thatthe Supreme Court will throw out the hated mandate. The problemwith that is court watchers of all stripes believe just theopposite: that requiring people engaged in interstate commerce todo something is settled law.

For example, in the New York Times onMarch 19, an article on the mandate issue talked about a concurringopinion by Justice Antonin Scalia in a 2005 case dealing withregulation of home-grown marijuana.

Citing the penultimate 1942 case, Wickard v. Filburn,Scalia wrote, “Congress may regulate even noneconomic localactivity if that regulation is a necessary part of a more generalregulation of interstate commerce.”

It was a passage the Obama administration quoted prominently ina recent brief in the healthcare case, the Times said.

And a recent Washington Post outlook story on the issuequoted Walter Dellinger, a former acting solicitor general thePost called “one of the healthcare law's most ardentconstitutional cheerleaders,” predicting that Chief Justice Robertswill write the opinion.

“The reason I think Chief Justice Roberts will write the opinionis because I think he will want to write a narrow opinion,”Dellinger said in the Post piece. “It would recognize thatthere are limits on Congress' powers, but that the Constitution'scommerce clause is fully met in a law that deals with the'intimately intertwined' issues of healthcare, insurance andinterstate markets.”

Dahlia Lithwick of Slate repeated what was said in theTimes article when she said, “That the law isconstitutional is best illustrated by the fact that—untilrecently—the Obama administration expended almost no energydefending it.”

Lithwick added, “The current fuss being made over the healthcarecases has offered the court a perfect cover story. They will hearsix hours of argument…they will pretend it is a fair fight withequally compelling arguments on each side. They will even reach outand debate the merits of the Medicaid expansion, although not asingle court saw fit to question it,” she said.

In other words, move on.

The emotion that has been generated over this legislation isprompted by the need for cynical politicians to obscure the factthat the policies they embraced over the last 15 years–includingtwo wars, a disastrous tax cut and huge budget deficits designed tobail out the pharmaceutical industry, amongst others–were failuresand led to the worst economic downturn since the Depression.