GOP trying to transform health care defeat into Election Day wins

Updated at 3:57pm ET Conservatives’ surprise and anger over Thursday’s Supreme Court decision upholding the Affordable Care Act are still sinking in, but they’re turning to the work of transforming defeat in the courtroom on Thursday into victory at the ballot box on Election Day.

In Senate and House races from North Dakota to New Hampshire, Republicans are or soon will be using Democratic candidates’ support for the ACA as a motivator to get conservatives to vote.

More than six million Texas residents are uninsured and many state representatives insist the President’s health care reform is not the solution. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, discusses.

“I know many of you are angry about the Supreme Court’s decision to uphold Obamacare,” said Sen. Jim DeMint, R- S.C., in a fund-raising e-mail to supporters of his Senate Conservatives Fund. “I am too. We’re now living in a post-constitutional era that is destroying our country.”

But he said in the wake of Thursday’s decision, “there is only one solution to our government’s unchecked power: win elections.”

Rep. Phil Gingrey, R- Ga., told reporters Friday, “I want to say to our base in the Republican Party: Get even more active than you’ve been. Get out and vote and take your friends with you. Because this train is leaving the station and there’s not going to be another opportunity. If Barack Obama is re-elected to a second term and we don’t replace him with the 45^th president then this law sinks in, it gets roots and it ain’t going away.”

In a more neutral tone, Chief Justice John Roberts had a similar message in his decision Thursday: If you’re unhappy with a decision made by Congress or the president, vote.

Roberts reminded Americans that — unlike Roberts himself — elected officials “can be thrown out of office if the people disagree with them.”

Roberts’s decision may have the effect of helping the Republican message machine by re-framing the insurance purchase mandate as a tax increase. As Roberts put it in his decision, going without insurance will now be “just another thing the Government taxes, like buying gasoline or

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