All this eventually got to the point where Biden actually stopped himself and said, "I've gotten to know you well enough. You want me to stop because I'm embarrassing you." He didn't stop, at least not immediately, but the atmosphere stayed jovial -- as he took the podium, Obama started off by saying, "Thank you, Joe," to some laughter.

When he spoke, Obama did acknowledge that the Senate still has work to do in passing the fixes to the bill he signed today, but he still had plenty of accomplishment to trumpet.

"While the Senate still has the last round of improvements to make on this historic legislation -- and these are improvements I'm confident they will make swiftly -- the bill I'm signing will set in motion reforms that generations of Americans have fought for and marched for and hungered to see," the president said. He went on to list some of the effects of the bill that will be felt immediately, a key talking point for Democrats as midterm elections approach.

Indeed, the political aspect of this, especially for Congressional Democrats, was a subtext throughout the president's speech. When he called the bill's passage "a testament to the historic leadership and uncommon courage of the men and women of the United States Congress who've taken their lumps during this difficult debate," one member of the audience yelled out, "Yes, we did!" This got the whole room laughing, including the president, who had to pause a couple times to collect himself.

And then there was another shout from the audience: "But we're still standing!"

After the speech, Obama got down to the main event, and signed the bill, switching pens after every letter so as to provide souvenirs for various people who'd played a role in getting the bill passed. Lawmakers tried to snap photos.

"No standing! No standing!" the press photographers in the back yelled, as if members of Congress really cared what they said. "Cameras down!"

Later, the crowd stayed, people milling around and congratulating each other for some time, which made for some interesting moments. Obama gave Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, whom he'd persuaded to support the bill, a big, happy hug. Sen. Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., who's been a tough nut for reform supporters to crack, walked up to White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and shook his hand. Emanuel, standing on the dais at the front of the room, looked down at Lincoln and sort of grinned -- not entirely in a friendly way.

Sharpton responded, "Well, first of all, then you'd have to say that the American public overwhelmingly voted for socialism when they elected President Obama. Let's not act as though the president didn't tell the American people -- the presdient promised the American people health reform when he ran, he was overwhelmingly elected running on that, and he has delivered what he promised. I don't understand Republicans saying this is against the will of the American people; they voted for President Obama, who said this was going to be one of the first things he would do."

That seems pretty clear, right? Sharpton's smacking down a talking point introduced by Geraldo by pointing out that, well, if this is socialism, then the American people voted for socialism. But for some on the right, what Sharpton's comment became was an admission that Obama and healthcare are socialist, and a declaration that the American people had voted for socialism in electing him.

Newsbusters -- a blog run by the Media Research Center, a conservative press watchdog -- appears to have been first to this misinterpretation. After that, it went viral pretty quickly. The Heritage Foundation's blog picked it up, and so did a number of other blogs. Finally, Monday night, the clip hit the bigtime, as Fox News' own Glenn Beck aired it on his show.

A spokeswoman for Sharpton didn't respond to requests for comment from Salon.

The classic version of this argument, of course, was around abortion and privacy law. But it showed up everywhere: detention, torture and surveillance cases, affirmative action, crime, punishment and the death penalty -- you name it. This criticism was always meant to target the liberal elite, for its disconnection from everyday folks. A clique of chardonnay-swilling Manhattanites called up their activist judge friends, and together they started picking away at the edifice of American justice and morality.

Well, now the shoe is on the other foot. The GOP has just lost an epic confrontation on the signal issue of the moment, and it happened after a decisive election, long public discussion, and finally, a vote on the floor of Congress. So what’s the conservative plan? Take it to the courts, of course.

The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder reports that at least 12 state attorneys general are filing suit to keep healthcare reform from being implemented in their states. Ambinder’s whole post is worth a read for his explanation of just why this is probably a doomed effort. "It is true that no court has ruled on the specific question, but there is plenty of reason and case law to believe that courts will be initially skeptical of the challenge. Congress's latitude here is wide."

But, as he points out, the lawsuits aren’t really about overturning healthcare. If you’re a red-state attorney general, you have your eye on the governorship or the U.S. Senate. These lawsuits are a strategy to endear guys like Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli, or Florida’s Bill McCollum, to their party bases. Writes Ambinder, "It advances the politics of conservative jurisprudence, and the political ambitions of conservatives, and it keeps the legislation itself in a state of suspended political animation."

The officials filing suit get to make themselves the center of the fight for conservatives. So what if they’re asking activist judges to strike down the will of the elected branch? By moving the location of the healthcare battle away from the zone subject to public contest, and into the judiciary, they’re also moving attention onto themselves.

After all, what the criticism of liberal judicial elitism always missed was that taking an issue to the courthouse is actually a weapon of the grassroots. Pragmatic party leaders are rarely thrilled about having to defend unpopular court decisions. How do you think, say, Rahm Emanuel feels about the ACLU?

By the same token, it would probably be a fiasco for the GOP if the lawsuit actually went anywhere, which it almost certainly won’t. Institutional pillars of the conservative establishment like the Chamber of Commerce are already distancing themselves from the repeal effort. (Why repeal, when you can just quietly gnaw away at the spirit of the reform at the regulatory level?) They'd probably go running the opposite direction if say, Justice Antonin Scalia voided a year’s worth of legislative heavy lifting. Republican presidential candidates would be forced to try to get to each other’s right by denouncing the constitutionality of the reform, hurting themselves in a general election. You can bet Mitt Romney is hoping this lawsuit dies quietly.

And while President Obama is surely not hoping for the judiciary to strike down his major accomplishment, he probably wouldn’t mind seeing some Republican lawyers standing on marble court stairs, holding forth on the unconstitutionality of universal healthcare.

"Know what this is?" he asked, showing a photo from Sunday on the screen, before flashing to a picture of a civil rights sit-in. "They locked arms, because they wanted to compare themselves to the civil rights activists. How dare you! Look at these people! They refused to get up!"

The picture he showed from Sunday, the one that so outraged him, featured House Speaker Nancy Pelosi walking arm-in-arm with Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga. Who, of course, was a leading civil rights activist in the 1960s. And part of the reason for the arm-in-arm march across Capitol Hill Sunday was because tea party protesters had called Lewis "nigger" (and yelled other racist and homophobic names at other Democrats) on Saturday; Democrats intended to show they weren't intimidated by the crowd demanding they kill the healthcare bill, as well as evoke memories of passing civil rights legislation.

But still! How dare Lewis compare himself to the civil rights activists! 

Watch here, courtesy of Media Matters:

I'm asking myself what kind of country are we today. We're not a representative republic. The will of the people was spat upon yesterday. The will of the people is of no concern to the people who now have power and authority from the White House all the way down to Capitol Hill. The will of the people is something to be crushed. So we're not a representative republic. You can't even say loosely defined we are much of a democracy. We have to restore these things. We have to do this by getting rid of these people at the ballot box. We must get them out of office. That's the only thing here.

Beyond the totally overheated rhetoric, there's a real irony here: What Limbaugh's talking about all comes down to opinion polls, and those have absolutely nothing to do with our actual system of governing. The Founding Fathers didn't put polling in the Constitution, and the first poll in American history wasn't even conducted until 1824.

So, yes, the polls show right now that the public is generally against the bill that House Democrats passed last night. But the vote in 2008 -- the only thing that actually matters in our system -- indicated that the public did want this kind of reform. (You can, of course, point to Scott Brown's recent election as evidence on the other side, but that's a single special election in a single state, and Brown's constituents don't vote for most other members of Congress.)

The Socialist Party just e-mailed reporters a statement from Wharton in which he slams the bill, saying it's not reform but is "instead a corporate restructuring of the American healthcare system designed to enhance the profits of private health insurance companies disguised with the language of reform."

I'd say we should alert Glenn Beck about this, but I have a horrible vision of that leading to some new conspiracy theory about the White House getting Wharton to release this statement as a false flag sort of thing, and some very convoluted chalkboard drawings.

The full press release:

Co-chair of the Socialist Party USA, Billy Wharton, opposes the healthcare bill passed yesterday by the House of Representatives and scheduled to be signed into law by President Barack Obama on Tuesday. Wharton's opposition is based on the belief that this bill is not a reform. Instead, it is a corporate restructuring of the health insurance industry created to protect the profit margins of private insurance companies.

The bill passed by the House yesterday would mandate all Americans to purchase health insurance coverage or face a fine. It would also create health insurance exchanges, an idea crafted by the right-wing Heritage Foundation, where people would purchase insurance from private companies. Those not eligible for Medicaid but who still could not afford to purchase insurance would receive public funds from the federal government to purchase bare bones coverage insurance plans from private insurers.

Wharton opposes this restructuring on the grounds that the mandates allow private insurers to use the coercive power of the state to enhance their private profits. Insurance credits will serve as a public subsidy to private companies. It is yet another case of public money that could be used for necessary social programs being funneled towards companies that engage in practices that are abusive and detrimental to the overall society. He believes the bill is also a demonstration of how deeply corporate lobbyists and campaign contributions have infected the country's political system.

"This is not a healthcare reform bill," says Wharton, "It is instead a corporate restructuring of the American healthcare system designed to enhance the profits of private health insurance companies disguised with the language of reform"

Instead, Wharton believes that public funds would be better spent in creating a national single-payer system. Democratic socialists see such a system of open access to care as one part of a larger transition toward making healthcare a guaranteed human right for all. Wharton calls for people to take power into their own hands by supporting the demand for single-payer health insurance and by conducting a red and green rebellion at the voting booth and in the streets to claim our human rights.

Wharton encourages people to visit the website of the Socialist Party USA to gain more information about the struggle for healthcare and the organization's broader vision of a democratic socialist society. http://socialistparty-usa.org/