This could be the day the Supreme Court hands down their ruling on the healthcare law. The tea leaves and entrails are already being read as each side braces for the news.

One thing is for sure: no matter which way the Court rules, it will be bad news for President Obama. Why? Because a win means that the Republicans will redouble their efforts to repeal it and demonize it into the November election, and a loss means that the GOP will stand astride the corpse of the biggest legislative achievement in the history of the galaxy and rub the president’s nose in it.

At least that’s what the Very Serious People inside the Beltway are sure of, and that’s how they roll.

If the Court rules against the individual mandate, it will be for political, not legal, reasons. That’s according to a survey of legal experts by Bloomberg.

In a broad consensus, 19 of the 21 respondents said that the mandate should be upheld. The survey was emailed last week to constitutional law professors at the U.S. News & World Report’s top 12 law schools. There was less agreement on how exactly the opinion would come down. Five said that the Court is likely to strike down the individual mandate anyway while 8 believed it as a toss-up.”

[…]

Almost all of the respondents, 18 out of 21, said that the Supreme Court will lose credibility if the mandate is struck down in a 5-4 decision. If that should happen, “it looks like the court is simply an arm of one political party,” University of Chicago law professor Dennis Hitchinson told Bloomberg.

Yeah, I think we’ve known the Court has basically sided with the GOP since December 2000, if not before, and Citizens United pretty much confirmed it.

The Court usually hands down its rulings around 10:00 AM ET. Stay tuned.

Update: Nope, not today. The ruling will probably be on Thursday. I wonder if it will be presented by the full court reading the opinions, majority and minority. How dramatic.