It sounds like the question at this point has moved from "Should we kill the mandate?" to "Should we kill just the mandate and keep the rest of the bill?"
Now, let's be honest here. Partially killing the bill is a conservative position; Dems at this point should be pushing for all or nothing. When you get right down to it, most of those 2700 pages is just a long series of bullshit concessions the GOP demanded in order to get the mandate passed. Now they're arguing for killing the mandate and leaving all those concessions in place. It's a naked political play, and all our power needs go into hanging it around their necks.
At the end of the day, the GOP doesn't really want the entire bill to go down: that'd be a minor victory for the zealous base that's already probably buying private insurance anyway, and a point of massive fury among the legions of people who just got their fucking health compromised over something that, for fuck's sakes, would be a conservative wet dream if they had done it themselves. I imagine Dick Cheney would give himself a heart attack masturbating so hard if someone proposed a law making it outright illegal to not buy oil.
And really, that's the other thing: the bill IS unconstitutional. And it hinges en-fucking-tirely on the point that is blatantly unconstitutional. It needs to be scrubbed and rewritten; that's the right thing to do. And I imagine that this time, it won't be a sideshow topic; a lot of people who just got the rugs yanked out from under them are going to be VERY INTERESTED in seeing the provisions of the bill reinstated immediately, and reinstated the right way, i.e. not by kneeling down and sucking the cock of the fucking private insurance industry.
That's a GOP nightmare scenario, right there. To have their bluff called so completely and be forced to clean up the mess in a way that compromises everything that they are. They can pat themselves on the back for embarrassing the Democrats in some minor (and completely deserved) way in an otherwise hopeless election year, but unless the SCOTUS ignores all precedent and really does let them all get off scot free for their nasty little trick, it's gonna fuck 'em, long and hard and for years to come. Our job right now is to get that petard as barbed and rusty as fucking possible.