After three days of oral arguments at the Supreme Court on Obamcare, liberals seem genuinely stunned that Obamacare has a good chance of going down in flames. They never saw it coming.
Consider this exchange between CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin and anchor Wolf Blitzer on the first day of the argument which focused on the individual mandate, provision of Obamacare which forces all Americans to purchase medical insurance or procure it via their employers:
TOOBIN: This was a train wreck for the Obama administration. This law looks like it's gonna be struck down. Justice Kennedy, the swing vote, was enormously skeptical. Every comment Kennedy made -- uh, at least that I heard -- was skeptical of the law. The wild card in this argument was, uh, Chief Justice Roberts. Chief Justice Roberts actually asked a lot of hard questions. Roberts seemed like a much more likely vote to uphold the law than Kennedy was.
BLITZER: This is really huge!
Anyone who had paid attention to conservative arguments about Obamacare leading up to its passage wouldn't have been so surprised. But that's what happens when liberal media elites spend all their time talking to liberal lawyers and liberal legal commentators about pending Supreme Court cases. They can't envision the possibility that, just maybe, the conservatives might have the better legal argument.
Radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh noticed this as well, marveling in a segment on Obamacare that this might actually be the first time many liberal elites have heard a conservative argument about the issue in its full context and force.
That's largely because most of them are so insulated from anything conservative or libertarian, hearing well-articulated conservative arguments being well-received simply does not compute. They're experiencing a culture shock to discover that conservatives aren't just a bunch of knuckle-dragging know-nothings who can't string more than three words together.
