Americans, incl. large majority of Democrats, think mandate unconstitutional.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

the Dems' worse nightmare is to have Obamacare upheld by the SCOTUS.

I wondered about that too, although that angle doesn't get much publicity.  Still, in my layman's understanding states can, via the tenth amendment, make an argument against it.  Just because the court upheld it last year doesn't mean it will always.  Plessy v. Ferguson was overturned after a decade or so, and this can be as well.  Hopefully, it won't come to that.  South Dakota has already passed a nullification act.  Maybe other states will follow suit. 

Fifty-seven years is not a decade, and nullification, unlike this mandate, is known to be unconstitutional.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

by whom?  by 72% of US voters polled randomly?  I doubt that.  But that's not a point I'm going to argue with you because I don't have the data to back that up.  What we do know is that The People recognize that they're being forced to do something by the government.  They don't like it.  They have a right not to like it, and although they might not all be lawyers, they have an inkling of idea that this bill is very, very wrong.  I'm not a lawyer either, and I could be wrong about this, but it really stinks.  And I am not alone.  Moreover, it doesn't necessarily depend upon the supreme court to do its job.  If we can install a GOP congress and president--and there's a chance, however slim, that we may be able to do this--then it won't come to that.  But if it does come to it, I"m not so sure that you can predict that the federal court can't be convinced that it is unconstitutional.  For example, many lawyers are already on the record saying that it violates the commerce clause.  I don't think that at least one wealthy opponent to the law will have trouble contracting at least one of those lawyers.  Big Brother, of course, will have its own highly-paid lawyers, but that's not always a guarantee of their success, fortunately.

'Known' wasn't necessarily the right word. Nullification has been doctrinally unconstitutional in the immensity of Supreme Court precedent on the subject for well over a century. Closer to two.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

It's quite frankly not about something the public has ever understood well at any point in the process.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Yes, and public health care would actually be much cheaper than that. There are of course ideological reasons one might oppose it, but it would be cheaper than trying to regulate dozens of moving parts of ostensibly 'private', highly corporatist 'markets' at once.

[Okay, maybe Mike Johnson is a competent parliamentarian.]

Yes, and public health care would actually be much cheaper than that.

I think this could be done, but it is not what the grossly-misnamed Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act does.  The bill is a mixture of stopgap measures that promises to increases the budget deficit by $562 billion.  Well, the exact figure is a moving target.  Republicans put it a 700 billion over the first ten years while Democrats put it at 230 billion.  Obviously it depends upon what assumptions one makes.  Ostensibly, it was meant to provide insurance to the uninsured, but even there it fails since it leaves 23 million people uninsured who are allowed to opt out of the mandate.  

It's a bad bill, Nathan.  You can proclaim the glories of socialized medicine if you want, and I'd agree with you that such a program does have its advantages, and I'd argue with you that it also has some disadvantages.  But in any case that's not what this monstrosity of a bill is.  The PPACA is a series of complicated reforms to an existing structure, which is already a mixed public/private market.  It was also enacted in an underhanded manner.  You should not try to rationalize the fact that 72% of people in a wealthy, relatively well-educated nation see it for what it is:  bad legislation.

Oh, no, I entirely recognize that it's terrible, terrible legislation. That's not what I'm disputing. I'm disputing, narrowly, the constitutional question, on which I disagree with you. I completely agree with you that the PPACA itself is largely terrible, but as Xahar said I'm not exactly eager to return to the 2008 status quo even so.