Charlie Cook: “It is a source of constant amusement to me that so many people obsess — as if fiddling with a Rubik’s Cube — over the various combinations of states that could get either President Obama or Mitt Romney to the magic number of 270 votes in the Electoral College. The guilty include pros at both ends of the political spectrum; people who ought to know better; and armchair analysts who seem to think that they can crack the magic code.”

“The simple fact is that our nation has had 56 presidential elections. In 53 of them (94.6 percent), the winner in the Electoral College also happened to be the one with the most popular votes… So people are expending a lot of time and energy trying to figure out something that has about a 1-in-20 chance of happening.”

First Read: “Yesterday’s SCOTUS outcome was typical of what we’ve seen for Obama over the past four years: He finds his back against the wall — sometimes due to his own doing, sometimes not — and then escapes disaster. We saw this during the Dem primary season before Iowa (remember the summer of ’07); during Jeremiah Wright; during the ’08 general after the McCain-Palin bounce, during the 2009-2010 health-care fight; and now after the Supreme Court’s ruling yesterday, which easily could have gone the other way.”

“And make no mistake: The decision upholding the law was something Obama and his allies NEEDED; they had to have something to show for the steep price they paid for the health-care law. This was a hurdle the president had to clear to get to November; but the ruling is no political booster rocket. He simply doesn’t have a new drag. Of course, as relates to his re-election, Obama once again finds his back against the wall. The unemployment rate is at 8.2%, and a majority of Americans think the country is on the wrong track. Can he again pull a rabbit from his hat here? We’ll find out in four months.”

Rothenberg Political Report: “Our new projection
for gains/losses in the House this November is now between a +1 gain for
Republicans and a +6 gain for Democrats.”

“We rate 201 seats a
safe GOP, 161 safe Dem, 25 as Lean/Favored for the GOP, 19 for
Lean/Favored for the Dems, and we have 29 total tossups.”

BuzzFeed notes that both presidential campaigns, “like the media, also have good reason to move on, as a slow summer week interrupted by the July 4 holiday approaches.”

“For Obama, the health care measure’s abiding unpopularity means that he is, at best, mounting a spirited defense. Romney, meanwhile, has centered his campaign on the clear case that the American economy is broken and he can fix it. He has avoided policy specifics, promising to ‘replace’ the current health care legislation without advancing a specific plan. A campaign centered on health care policy — which might have come from a different Supreme Court verdict — would have pulled him into the weeds of an issue on which his own support for near-universal, government-backed health care in Massachusetts makes him a flawed messenger.”

Politico: “Over the next six weeks or so, health care will be an unpredictable race within a race: The Obama campaign will seek to downplay the more divisive details of the law and tout the court’s approval of his signature legislative accomplishment as proof of his effectiveness — courtesy of an unlikely bipartisan partnership with a powerful conservative, Chief Justice John Roberts.”

“For Mitt Romney, who had every reason to expect the conservative high court to strike down at least a big part of the law, the decision requires a bit of recalibration. He had hoped to portray a full or partial repeal as evidence Obama squandered the trust of the American electorate by wasting two years that could have been used to create more jobs.”

Washington Post: “If conservatives
needed any more motivation to unseat President Obama, they got it
Thursday from the Supreme Court, which provided fresh political
opportunities for Mitt Romney even as it handed the president a legal
victory… Romney’s history, however, may make it difficult for him to capi­tal­ize on that argument.”

“As president, Mitt will nominate judges in the mold of Chief Justice Roberts…”

— MittRomney.com, as found by Andrew Sullivan.