This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, November 14th, 2011.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The Supreme Court will hear challenges to the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.

The oral argument and the ruling will likely come in the heat of a presidential election year.

Ilia Shapiro, Senior Fellow in Constitutional Studies at the Cato Institute, comments.

Today was the day that we've long been awaiting for the year and a half since these lawsuits were first filed.

The Supreme Court granted cert on a number of issues in

the Obamacare litigation.

All of them on the 11th Circuit case, the one brought by the now 26 states and the National

Federation of Independent Business.

What was surprising was that it set five and a half hours for the argument.

This is a modern record.

I know the campaign finance, the McCain-Feingold case was granted three hours, but I'm not aware

of any case in decades. I mean, I don't know if you have to go back to Daniel Webster's time when they were at it for

days and days but this really is something different and they're going to be

arguing over a course of a couple of days I've been informed in March or

maybe early April.

They're taking two hours on the meat of the issue,

the constitutionality of the individual mandate

under either the Commerce Clause or the taxing power.

They're taking an hour and a half on severability,

meaning if the mandate falls, what gets taken with it, the whole Act, just community rating and guaranteed issue or something in between.

...