Health Care Ruling Expected to Galvanize Republicans

(Newsroom America) -- Conservatives long opposed President Obama's signature health care law, but the U.S. Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice John Roberts, upheld most of it as constitutional in a 5-4 ruling Thursday, fueling what many analysts believe will be a tsunami of Republican angst that could spur greater voter turnout heading into the November election.

GOP nominee Mitt Romney has already seized on the conservative momentum following the ruling in which Roberts unexpectedly became the swing vote and sided with the high court's liberal minority. The former Republican governor of Massachusetts raised millions of dollars in the hours following the ruling after he vowed to repeal it next year if elected president.

"As of this morning, we have raised $4.3 million with 43,000 donations online," said spokeswoman Andrea Saul.

"The Supreme Court may have found ObamaCare constitutional, but it remains just as disastrous for job creators as the day the law was passed. ObamaCare is a job killer — it raises taxes, cuts Medicare and puts government between patients and their doctors," she told The Hill newspaper.

Following the court's ruling, Romney vowed to kill the law in its entirety.

"Today, the Supreme Court upheld ObamaCare. But regardless of what the court said about the constitutionality of the law, ObamaCare is bad medicine, it is bad policy, and when I’m president, the bad news of ObamaCare will be over," he said.

Perhaps mindful of the conservative backlash to his victory, Obama - in addressing the country following the ruling - chose his words carefully, so as not to appear as though he was gloating.

"What we won't do - what the country can't afford to do - is refight the political battles of two years ago, or go back to the way things were," he said.

Republicans say the decision has already begun to have positive effects for their election efforts - observations that are backed by a number of political observers.

"Today, Barack Obama won the battle, but will lose the war. The Supreme Court decision makes Obamacare the central issue in the 2012 election, just like it was in the 2010 election. And we know how that turned out," wrote Dick Morris, a former adviser to then-President Bill Clinton, wrote on his blog Thursday.

Calling Obama's Supreme Court win a "Pyrrhic victory," Morris noted that "public opinion has rejected this law for two years now by about the same margin: 40 percent support; 55 percent oppose." He went onto say that, while the law may get a small bump in approval over the short term, public opinion will return to the 40-55 percent margin before election day.

"In a real sense, the Supreme Court did not let Obama off the hook by striking down the law. Now he will have to defend it during the election," Morris wrote.

"Winners celebrate and losers mobilize," George Edwards, a presidential scholar at Texas A&M University, told McClatchy Newspapers. "This puts health care back in the center of the debate where it hasn't been since it passed, and that's not necessarily good for him."

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