When she heard about the ruling in Kelo v. New London, the Supreme Court’s infamous and controversial 2005 eminent domain case, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi exclaimed, “This is almost as if God has spoken.” Four years later, when asked about the possibility that Obamacare would be found unconstitutional, she acted as if the devil had spoken: “Are you serious?” This is the same tone liberals have been taking ever since the first lawsuits were filed challenging President Obama’s national health care law. They hope to delegitimize an unfavorable ruling in advance.

Today, the Supreme Court begins hearing six hours of oral arguments on the matter — the most it has granted any case since the 1960s. And liberal commentators are still heaping ridicule on opponents of the law, treating them as if they were birther amateurs cooking up legal theories about Hawaiian vital records law. Sahil Kapur of Talking Points Memo informs us that if the justices respect precedent, “they’ll uphold the law. An ideology-driven move to strike down the mandate, a central component of the law, would mark a rare, swift departure from precedent.” Both Linda Greenhouse of the New York Times and UCLA law professor Adam Winkler mock the law’s challengers for repeatedly pointing out that Obamacare’s individual mandate is “unprecedented” — in Winkler’s words, they “emphasize the novelty argument because they have little else on which to rely.”