Why the individual mandate doesn’t matter   The Supreme Court’s
long-awaited ruling on the President Obama’s health care law
could come as early as Monday. All eyes are on the disputed
individual mandate and what happens if the court only upholds
portions of the law.  Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg
described the issue at hand by comparing it to dicing up
vegetables. She posed the question, “If the individual mandate
requiring the purchase of insurance or the payment of a
penalty — if that is unconstitutional, must the entire act fall?
Or may the mandate be chopped, like a head of broccoli, from the
rest of the act?”  If the individual mandate does get cut, what
difference would it make to uphold the rest of the law?  On
Wednesday’s edition of The Last Word, University of Minnesota
professor Lawrence Jacobs said not a whole lot. “This is not
rocket science,” he told msnbc’s Lawrence O’Donnell. “The
mandate is simply not that big a deal.”  Lawrence O’Donnell has
been arguing the mandate in President