Happy Second of July, everyone! Happy Independence Day!

Now, you may be thinking: "Has Chris gone bonkers? Why is he jumping the gun, two days early?" The answers to these important queries are: No, Chris has not gone any more bonkers than usual; and, in fact, the rest of you are celebrating a fictitious event on a fictitious anniversary date. So there.

I quote from the illustrious John Adams, writing to his beloved wife Abigail on July 3, 1776:

The second of July 1776, will be the most memorable epocha in the history of America. I am apt to believe it will be celebrated by succeeding generations as the great anniversary festival. It ought to be commemorated as the day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with pomp and parade, with shows, games, sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of this continent to the other, from this time forward forevermore.

"But..." I hear you say, "...but July 4th is when the Declaration of Independence was signed, and that's what we commemorate." Well... no. Sorry.

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Well, that was a pretty stunning week. Lots of other things happened politically, but in truth it was a one-issue type of week, so this is going to be a one-issue type of column.

I must admit being personally stunned at the Obamacare decision -- not so much what it said (stunning enough), but who said it. Before the ruling, I would have given odds on two or three possible permutations: a 5-4 ruling with Kennedy being the swing vote (either way), or quite possibly a 6-3 ruling upholding Obamacare and the mandate, with Roberts joining Kennedy and the liberal wing (likely because Roberts would realize he needed to be on the right side of history on this one). But I don't think I ever even considered the possibility of a 5-4 decision with Roberts as the key swing vote. I don't feel too bad for missing this possibility, because everyone else in the entire media/political/legal universe also missed it.

Which was why it was so stunning. It was as if Lex Luthor suddenly decided that fighting next to Superman for truth, justice, and the American way was truly the right thing to do. Roberts may have prompted this last sentence (I admit) with his comment about where he's heading on vacation (to Malta, which Roberts joked was an "impregnable island fortress")... where maybe he'll seek some solitude, perhaps...?

All kidding aside, though, it certainly has been fun to see the other side spin. As a child's reader might put it: "See GOP spin. Spin, spin, spin! So sad, the spinning."

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As is my wont, I'm going to circle the edges of the political bombshell John Roberts just flung into the arena. Maybe by tomorrow, it'll have percolated through my brain enough to intelligently attack the main issue, but I just haven't reached that point yet, so you'll have to forgive me.

To begin my amble around the periphery, there's the title of this article. If you haven't seen it already, there's a great retouched photograph making the rounds today, which is downright hilarious, so check it out. More on this in a moment.

The image comes from two "news" networks (scare quotes are mandatory, today) -- CNN and Fox News Network -- who jumped the gun and ran with "Mandate struck down" headlines. Whoops! In their feverish rush to get the news up a full ten seconds before every other news network in the universe had the same news, these two flat-out got the news wrong. They blew it. Big time. They looked for a "scoop" where none was ever going to exist. Insert your own moralizing here about insta-news.

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You'll have to forgive me for opening with a joke, but there's been a "song" running through my mind all week. It's from an old comedy routine I heard decades ago, so I have no idea which comedian to credit. The comedian was suggesting new lyrics for our National Anthem, with a practical interpretation based on when we usually actually sing it. So, everyone sing along with me, in your collective heads:

"As we stand here waiting / For the ball game to start..."

Don't know why that's been running through my head... heh. Actually, that's a lie. I'm just as interested as the next pundit in what the Supremes are going to say tomorrow about Obamacare, but I just don't think it's worth talking about here until it happens, that's all. Instead, I'd like to take a summertime flight of electoral fancy.

Once or twice per presidential election, I like to engage in the sheerest of blue-sky speculation about possible interesting outcomes which could happen. Four years ago, I engaged in idle speculation about a 269-269 tie in the Electoral College. This time around, the scenario I've been hearing bandied about is that Barack Obama wins the Electoral College vote, but Mitt Romney wins the popular vote. Barring Supreme Court cases, this would mean a second term for Barack Obama, of course.

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[Program Note: I'm having computer problems today, so couldn't manage to get a new article out. I wrote the following a few months ago, and it seemed like a good week to revisit it.]

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It's time once again to begin seriously taking a look at the electoral math for the upcoming election. I know, I know, everyone else is court-watching this week, but instead I decided to spend some time poll-watching, for those of you who may be getting tired of endless Supreme Court speculation and analysis.

This column series will examine the race between Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama in the only way which is useful for actually predicting its outcome: a state-by-state look at how each candidate is doing. National polling is almost completely useless in election prognostication, because our Constitution simply does not care what the national vote totals turn out to be (see: the 2000 election). We actually elect presidents using the Electoral College, which makes such predictions a lot more complicated, since it necessitates examining each state's numbers individually. But complicated is our middle name here, so let's dig in and see what the state of the race (pun intended) truly is, at this point in time.

We're going to begin by taking a look backwards, in some ways. This column series ran throughout the 2008 election, which makes this fairly easy (since we saved the charts from back then). Let's start with a comparison of Barack Obama's status as it stands now, compared to what it was back in 2008. Future columns may refer back to the 2008 charts, but to begin 2012 with I thought a side-by-side comparison would be helpful (older charts are from my final 2008 Electoral Math column).

Final 2008 Obama Electoral Math Chart

2012 Obama Electoral Math Chart

A technical note before we begin -- we started our charts this year about a month earlier than we did in 2008 (May 8th versus June 3rd), so take that into account when comparing the two. Also, click on any of these charts to see a larger version, with all the details visible.

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For political wonks, this has been a week of waiting. Starting last weekend, we've all been waiting for Mitt Romney to address the issue of Barack Obama's new immigration policy. This waiting has been fruitless, and will continue for some time to come, apparently. Picture a phone ringing endlessly with nobody there to answer it... but we're getting ahead of ourselves.

The bigger waiting game this week has been at the Supreme Court, where two very important decisions are about to be handed down, on the Affordable Obamacare Act (so to speak), and on the Arizona immigration case. Both cases will impact the elections this year, but it is impossible to say how at this point. Either next Monday or next Thursday, however, we'll have at least a partial answer to this question.

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Maybe that should be "Navel-Gazing Column Ahead," you'll have to decide. You have been warned.

Well, we didn't notice until two weeks too late, but this column just celebrated its sixth anniversary. You read that right -- we've been doing this for six years (and two weeks) now.

The first of these columns appeared exclusively within The Huffington Post, but within a year I had managed to get the ChrisWeigant.com site up and running, and now we've got everything archived back to our very first installment (which, sadly enough, still has the ring of truth about it today).

I certainly had no idea, when writing that in June of 2006, that I'd still be here cranking these things out six years later. But here we are, against all odds.

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My title today is a familiar phrase to anyone who went to school in America as a child. It seemed a relevant day to discuss the subject, since we're seeing some serious checking and balancing in Washington today. Since I don't have enough factual information on the situation surrounding Eric Holder and the "Fast and Furious" program to intelligently form an opinion at the moment, it might behoove us all to review the concepts involved with the separated powers of our government. If you would prefer instead to listen to uninformed partisan ranting, well, there's plenty of that out there today in the blogosphere, so feel free to read some of that sort of thing instead.

When the United States Constitution was being debated, strong arguments for it were made anonymously in the newspapers of the day, which were then consolidated into the Federalist Papers. In the ninth one of these essays, Alexander Hamilton wrote of "legislative balances and checks" in the new governmental structure. The concept (and the term "checks") was repeatedly discussed throughout the rest of the essays as well. At some point in time, the term must have been flipped around to the "checks and balances" we speak of today.

But while the phrase sounds noble, in reality what the different branches of our government regularly engage in is much more like a tug-of-war. This is what we're seeing today, between the Executive and Legislative branches. More on this in a moment.

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Republican senators are backing up Mitt Romney's vacillation on the new changes in immigration President Obama announced last Friday -- with even more vacillation. To put it another way, Mitt Romney is effectively leading his party... into a morass of uncertainty.

The first inkling that President Obama's co-option of Marco Rubio's idea for a watered-down DREAM Act had created befuddlement in the Republican Party was, of course, Mitt Romney's waffling -- which we explored yesterday in great detail. Now the secondary ripples from Mitt's refusal to announce any sort of political stance or clear decision seem to be appearing.

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