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Quinnipiac Poll: Swing-State Voters Think the Supreme Court Should Overturn All of Obamacare

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The survey straightforwardly asked: “The Supreme Court has heard a challenge to the health care law. Do you want the Supreme Court to uphold the health care law or to overturn it?”

In Pennsylvania, where Obama leads Romney by eight points, 46 percent of voters said that the Supreme Court should strike down the law, compared to 43 percent who did not. In Florida and Ohio, a majority of voters favored a SCOTUS strike-down: by a 51-38 margin in Florida, and a 51-37 one in Ohio. The poll appears to have sampled Democrats and Republicans in representative proportions.

What’s interesting about these results is that they are based on the Supreme Court overturning the entirety of the law, and not merely its extremely unpopular individual mandate. (h/t Jim Geraghty.)

The poll, to put it mildly, adds to the inaccuracy of President Obama’s assertion that it would be “unprecedented” for the High Court to strike down the Affordable Care Act because a “strong majority” of Congress supported the law. It wasn’t, in fact, a “strong majority”—the law passed by one vote in the Senate and a handful in the House—but, insofar as Obama is citing these majorities to suggest that the law has popular support, whereas unelected judges do not, he’s clearly wrong.

And let’s not forget that the Obama administration has been happy to endorse Constitutional challenges to laws passed by truly strong majorities, like the Defense of Marriage Act, that the President disagrees with.

Though both sides are capable of believing that “constitutionality” equals policies they favor, many progressives have an explicit disdain for a fusty, centuries-old document that, in their minds, has no special claim on how government should be structured today.

This renders comical the portentous pronouncements of liberal editorialists who threaten that the Court’s legitimacy is at stake if it strikes down the law. The New Republic has published a steady stream of articles of this type, most recently an April 20 editorial screaming that such action would be “devastating” for the “Supreme Court’s legitimacy” and have “major implications for how Americans view the Supreme Court.”

The fact is that nearly every judge, on both sides of the case, has agreed that Obamacare’s individual mandate grants unprecedented powers to the federal government. Even President Obama, the Constitutional scholar, expressed reservations about the mandate as his team began formulating its health-reform plan. Paul Starr has, in TNR’s own pages, explained why the mandate was a gross “miscalculation” by the administration.

And, contrary to the magazine’s threats, it’s clear from opinion polls that the American people, on the whole, wouldn’t be particularly troubled if the Court struck down the law. Insofar as those attacking the Court’s “legitimacy” are doing so in order to intimidate Justice Kennedy into seeing things their way, neither the law nor the facts are on their side.

Follow Avik on Twitter at @aviksaroy.