This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Friday, March 30, 2012. I'm Caleb Brown.

It was a rare week at the Supreme Court to assess the President's health care law.

First, the Court had to decide if they could rule on some matters at all.

Then they parsed the individual mandate,

and then they considered the law's dramatic expansion of Medicaid.

Trevor Burris, a legal associate of the Cato Institute, takes a look at what happened and what's next?

Weather forecasters have to do live shots outside of a building or out in the snow, for example, they will stick a ruler into

the snow to measure the inches of precipitation. That is not how you measure inches of precipitation. That is not how you measure inches of precipitation of course and they

know that. And I think a lot of reporters who cover the Supreme Court, TV reporters especially, no better than to draw too many conclusions from an oral

argument at the Supreme Court.

In this case, we're talking about a highly contentious issue, an issue where pretty much

only a couple of votes seem to matter.

Is it fair to read this much into the oral argument that occurred at the Supreme Court this week?

Well, it depends on what side of the issue you're on.

I think that the opponents of the mandate have much more to read into the argument

than the proponents of the mandate.

And how much the proponents of the mandate, the people who think it's constitutional, particularly

the scholars and media types, how much the proponents of mandate have

sort of gone off on the oral arguments to various degrees has been fascinating.

But going into it, we didn't really know what would happen as an opponent of the mandate.

We didn't know what arguments they were buying, whether or not they were understanding it.

We've been working to make these distinctions and to make very, very fine, you know, arguments

...