The Supreme Court is set to hand down its decision over Obamacare as early as next week, and everybody's going to be talking about it (unless Beiber (Bieber?) breaks his eyebrow again). If you haven't been paying attention, or need a refresher course, here's a handy guide to faking your way through a convo about the Affordable Care Act, complete with a glossary, useful links, handy phrases, drink recommendations and warning lines that you need to make for the exit.

Glossary:

PPACA: The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, which is also the

ACA: Affordable Care Act, which is now

Obamacare: <spooky>PPACA</spooky>

Individual Mandate: The individual mandate makes sure everybody either participates in the market or pays a fine equivalent to their participation. This is meant to reduce costs, both by widening the base that pays into insurance, and by keeping people healthier from the start, thereby lowering the aggregate costs. The ACA also has provisions, such as not denying coverage to patients with preexisting conditions, that would be prohibitively expensive unless everybody (read: healthy people) were paying into the market. This was originally an idea of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that wanted to solve the insurance free-loader problem. It is now at the heart of conservatives' big-government complaint about Obamacare, but many fear the law cannot function without it.

Commerce Clause: An enumerated power in the Consitution that Congress has the ability to regulate commerce between states. When paired with the "necessary and proper" clause, according to the Obama Administration's argument, the Commerce Clause allows Congress to compel citizens to purchase insurance as part of a regulation of interstate commerce.

Limiting principle: The principle that the government's "necessary and proper" right to compel an individual to purchase insurance doesn't give the government unlimited power to compel a citizen to do anything it can think of. Many Court observers think Justice Anthony Kennedy is most concerned about the government's inability to articulate any limiting principle and thus will strike the bill down; PoliticOlogy thinks Kennedy will write one for the government in the process of upholding the law.

Severability: Can the ACA be passed without—i.e., severed—the individual mandate, and if so, how?

What Might Happen

The Court strikes down the law: The Court would strike down the whole of the ACA, either on the logic that the law does not fall within the purview of the Commerce Clause, as not being insurance is by definition not economic activity, or because compelling an individual to purchase a product violates the "necessary and proper" clause.

The Court strikes down the individual mandate but leaves the rest of the law: This is everybody's fear. If the Court strikes down the individual mandate, many of the ACA's provisions will be unsustainable. Untangling the mandate from the law would be quagmire in the best of times, let along in an election year when Congress is so dysfunctional it can't even pass the Violence Against Women Act.

The Court upholds the law: This was originally what everybody thought would happen, before the disastrous oral arguments. 

Topic: What's everybody arguing about?

Read:

Obamacare Goes to Court, Analysis: Well, Is This Thing Constitutional or Not?, PoliticOlogy. Money line:

Health insurance, in short, is a unique product, in that it will be consumed by everybody, but can only function through universal participation. This makes it one national economic activity, clearly under the purview of the Commerce Clause, but without much application to other areas where states or individual rights "have historically been sovereign," in the words of the Justice Department's brief. 

What to say:

"We should have just asked Anthony Kennedy for his opinion the moment the effing thing passed."

"Verrilli spent too much of his oral argument arguing for the necessity of the law as a public good, rather than its legal legitimacy under Court precedence. He made it sound like the government was enacting an unprecedented law in response to a public heath crisis of its own imagination, when in fact the government was acting fully within its purview."

"For all that the Court sounded skeptical during oral arguments, if Roberts et al believe their own rhetoric about judicial restraint, they should uphold the law. If not, they're outing themselves as the judicial activists conservatives have been warning us about all these years."

Things not to say:

"So this means the government can force us to eat broccoli?"

Drink:

Negroni, Sapphire or better, rocks, orange peel

Next: What will Democrats do if it's overturned?

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Follow on Ology: Evan McMurry |  PoliticOlogy

Follow on Twitter: @evanmcmurry  |  @OlogyPolitics

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