This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Thursday, December 23rd, 2010.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The challenge to Obamacare will heat up in 2011 and the issue may soon be before the US Supreme Court.

What will that challenge look like and how will it shape the High Court's decision?

Ilia Shapiro is a senior fellow in constitutional studies at the Cato Institute, he comments.

Well, last week the Virginia judge found the individual mandate portion of Obamacare unconstitutional.

Two judges previous to that, one in a different part of Virginia and one in Michigan, granted the

government's motion to dismiss, essentially saying that the lawsuits were, if not frivolous, at least didn't have much merit.

And coming probably next month or the month after that, we'll have a decision in the Florida case.

That's 20 states, soon to be 27 states challenging the individual mandate as well as other provisions.

Look, when you do the law, you don't count up how many

judges are on one side or the other. I mean, you do when you're counting Supreme Court justices.

But all of these lower court opinions, these are just the initial skirmishes in the long-term legal battle.

All of these are now going to go up on appeal.

We're filing a brief this week in the Sixth Circuit appealing the Michigan case and will have involvement in other places.

This is all just setting the ground for an eventual Supreme Court involvement, which I expect

to be probably in the spring of 2012 with a

decision the last week of June of that year.

What are the options that the Supreme Court will likely have before it in making a judgment?

Well the Supreme Court will have decisions from various of the lower courts.

They'll take their time.

They don't necessarily have to rule on accepting or denying a cert petition from the first

...