Mitt Romney’s in a political box – he can’t call healthcare reform a tax because that means he raised taxes as governor. Michael Smerconish talks to MSNBC political analysts Mark Halperin and Chris Cillizza.

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Let me finish tonight with the dance of death we've been witnessing these past 24 hours. 

Want to know the precise location of this country's political zaniness? Just pay close attention on-line or on-air to the clenched-teeth seething from the right — from Limbaugh to Savage to Brent Bozell, the fury that knows how to get heard is screaming in pain and rampage.  

It wants blood — the Chief Justice's to start with, then onto the Supreme Court itself, then onto the President, and all those people who agreed with him that what he did was not only constitutional, but deeply American.

This much we know right now. A new poll shows that the Supreme Court decision of yesterday is building the case for the Affordable Care Act. There's now an even balance of view on the plan, a dramatic upsurge from before. People are beginning to open their minds about the bill, ready to take a look at the features that affect them, earnest in understanding the before and after of this matter — how things will be for the better and at what cost. 

The question right now concerns the politics. Why were the liberals, the Democrats, the reasonable people able to look forward to this decision by the Supreme Court with some kind of equanimity, able to say to themselves, "Let's see how this goes," preparing themselves to live with the results.  

It's called rule by law: don't have to like the law, just have to obey it.

Then came the thunder from the right last night — the lightning of outrage, the charges of treason and calls for defiance, all the notes beloved by the crazies. Don't like something? Blast away at it as if it's time to hit the barricades. Yell, "Treason!" Charge all who disagree with you as traitors. Call for massive resistance.  

It's what we saw in the civil rights movement, what we saw throughout our history when progress came: outrage, calamitous outrage, warnings of the worst to come.

Don't ask who's causing this country's poisonous political discourse. You can hear it screaming and screeching from the right.

Salon.com’s Joan Walsh and political analyst Ron Reagan join Hardball to discuss the reaction from the right on the Supreme Court’s health care decision, from Sarah Palin’s anger to Michael Savage’s irrational rant to Rush Limbaugh’s striped black and white “jail” shirt.

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Let me finish tonight with Mr. Chief Justice John Roberts.  

What I treasure in public affairs — in human existence — is the unpredicted, those moments when a person does something that staggers the rest of us, that is so phenomenal it blows us away.

John Roberts has just performed one of those acts. He did what judges are up there to do. He was "judicious," looking at the Obama health care act from all angles, at how from each perspective does or does not pass muster with the Constitution. He did so, as he said today,by  looking for that angle from which the Obama measure could be ruled to square with the country's organizing document. He admitted to looking 'til he found it.

So the big question: What pushed him? What made him look 'til he found the route for the Obama health care act to constitutional acceptability? What was it that encouraged him, John Roberts, to go beyond the interstate commerce clause and find the taxing authority, the provision he believed gave Obama's act its okay by the constitution?

My hunch, knowing Justice Roberts and his wife just a bit, is that his motive was high morality. He wanted to do good and went looking for a way to do it consistent with his oath to respect the Constitution. He wanted to protect both. That's the heart of it: the one shot this country has at looking to the welfare of all our people, and the one way it could square with a constitutionally-limited government.

There is in our church a commitment to social justice. It runs deep and wide — crossing these sad divides between right and left — and it holds to the central belief shared by so many religions to look out for our brothers and sisters on this earth. It hues against the notion of "every man for himself" and steers us all toward something finer, something of obligation in our lives to our fellow mankind.

It is worthy, it is good, and today the highest court in our country agreed with it, saying that when it comes to health and health care, we Americans have no obstacle to doing what is right.

Let's all put our heads on the pillow tonight saying this was a good day for our country, a good day to have lived and to have known we live in a good country — one that is trying harder each generation to be better.

Chris Matthews talks with the Huffington Post’s Howard Fineman and New York Magazine’s John Heilemann about the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, and what that means for the presidential election in November.

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Let me finish tonight with the Supreme Court.

Does anyone wonder, like I do, what this Supreme Court — the one personified by Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas — would have done in the landmark decisions of the post-World War II era?

I wonder if it would have backed desegregation in the Brown case. I doubt this pack of conservatives, which includes Chief Justice John Roberts, Sam Alito and Anthony Kennedy, would have voted to knock down "separate but equal" back in the 1950s. I doubt this group would have removed organized prayer from public schools back in the 1960s — the decision that ignited the moral majority. I doubt that this Court would have recognized a woman's right to decide on an abortion in the 1970s.  

Let me proffer a tougher judgment: would this court, voting as it does today, have upheld the 1964 Civil Rights Bill — the statute which declared it illegal to refuse access to someone because of race to a restaurant, hotel or a gas station restroom? Would Scalia, Thomas, Alito and Kennedy have approved such a decision, or would they have joined in the dissent? (Well, maybe Kennedy.)

The fact is, we have the most conservative Court since the early 1930s and maybe more conservative than that. These justices, led by Scalia, believe in original intent. They want to judge cases the way the Founding Fathers would.

The Founding Fathers, need I remind us, wrote slavery into the Constitution. It took a civil war and the Thirteenth Amendment to get it out.  

Let me finish tonight with this.

The Supreme Court stands on the verge of changing American political history. The fate of what the President proposed, what Congress debated, what was written into law is now to be decided by a single justice.

This will be hard to take. We, the American people, have invested an extraordinary amount of argument in this matter. On the left, the fight has been waged between those who wanted a public option and were willing to risk the whole health care measure for it, and those who thought it better to get what was gettable and not risk getting nothing.

Now the prospect of getting just that looms over the horizon. By June, we may get a ruling from the Court across the lawn that all this sturm and drang has been wasted.

The reaction on the right could take two courses.

One--and this would be the nastiest and also the most effective--would be an out-and-out charge against the President that he violated the Constitution, that he resorted to a terrible, historic abuse of his office by shoving through a measure which violates his oath of office. "It is not only unconstitutional," they would say. "He is!" 

It would be seized upon like FDR's court-packing as an historic presidential overreach, an act worthy of an historic rejection by the American people--or actually worthy of one.

A far kinder reaction would be for a Republican presidential nominee--Mitt Romney would be perfect for the role--to accuse Obama of wasting a year and a half of his early presidency on a wild-goose chase, wasting those valuable months in the country's history to work a bipartisan challenge to the country's economic crisis.

Either way, it will be hard for the President to view a rejection of his number one legislative achievement as anything less than a body blow to his work since being elected in that historic balloting of 2008.

So here we go into a brutal period of deliberation. By June, we will know whether Justice Anthony Kennedy has given approval to the affordable health care or not. We will know what the fight is going to be like between June and November. 

It will be far better for the President if the Supreme Court approves what he's done. Far better for the country. 

We'll have to see what comes if it does not. This is a daunting situation.

What’s next for President Obama’s healthcare reform law if the Supreme Court strikes it down? Chris talks to NBC’s Pete Williams, The Washington Post’s Ezra Klein, and former Obama Spokesman Reid Cherlin.

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Let me finish tonight with this: I can't think of a more important Supreme Court verdict on an act of Congress since it upheld the Civil Rights Act of 1964.  

The issue before it now, the power of the United States government, to regulate interstate commerce is along the same lines of the Civil Rights Act, although it seems harder to argue that the federal government can make you buy something you don't want to buy than it does to argue that once you open a business, you can't discriminate against a customer on account of race.

There's a harder way to size up this case: Does the federal government have the right under the justices' reading of the Constitution to make you buy something that you would not otherwise buy?  

This is high stakes action with a variety of possible consequences. Let's look at the worst from the President's point of view: 

The court strikes down the President's health care bill--"Obamacare," if you will--as unconstitutional. Think how the Republicans, from Romney on down, will run with it! "The President 'acted unconstitutionally.' He violated his oath to the Constitution, the promise to protect it for this country."

This will play without even saying so into the hands of the far right who deny the President's legitimacy. They will say that he was not legitimate to begin with, shouldn't have been allowed to take the office, and now stands exposed as a breaker of the Constitution.

I believe there's a good chance the Supreme Court will rule in the other direction, will give the President the victory, the hard work that was done by him and the Congress, he deserves. He will be granted the elevated stature in history as the American who delivered on a promise made through much of the 20th century, but delivered, primarily because of him, in the 21st. 

Heavy stakes. Very heavy.

The Supreme Court hears arguments about Pres. Obama’s health care reform law. Chris talks to Jenny Beth Martin of Tea Party Patriots and bioethicist Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel.

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