Randy Barnett, is that you?

St_Francis_P: Erm...exactly how could Democrats pressure a conservative judge?

Compromising photographs involving him, Thomas, and Alito.

Sensei Can You See: If you RTFA you see Obama and Leahy making some rather oddly timed and phrased statements that don't make much sense unless they knew what was going on in SCOTUS and wanted to try to bring public pressure to bear on Roberts.

These guys are supposed to interpret the law without regard to popular opinion or consequences or anything else like that, but they're human too, I guess.

Please. The right has been gearing up for this narrative for months. They blamed the liberal blogosphere for talking about the Court's reputation and judicial legitimacy. It was terrific spin:

Outcome A: The mandate is upheld, and Chief Justice Roberts caved to liberal pressure.
Outcome B: The mandate is struck down, and Chief Justice Roberts stood up to those dirty dirty liberals!

Honestly, from the way the opinions are structured it looks like this:

Originally, Roberts, for whatever reason, wanted to sever and strike down the mandate (and probably the guaranteed issue provision with it), but save the rest of the law. The liberal four wanted to uphold the whole law on commerce grounds, and the other four conservatives wanted to strike the whole thing. Roberts spent much of the time between conference and the release of the opinion trying to convince the conservatives to join him on severability, and they him on the same.

When it goes nowhere, Roberts starts looking around for options, and chooses to uphold the mandate and the rest of the law with it, while getting from the liberals a compromise on the Medicare Expansion provisions. This was the best option available to him: striking down the whole law would have been drastic and would have spent a lot of the Court's political capital - there was literally no reason not to sever the mandate and its related provisions from the rest of the law; so much of it was completely unrelated to the mandate that it's impossible to imagine that Congress wouldn't have ever passed the rest if it didn't have the mandate. It would have been a blatant political decision, when there's still a sizable portion of the country a bit upset about Bush v. Gore.

In response to this, the rest of the conservative justices, in a fit of pique, almost completely refuse to acknowledge the Chief Justice's opinion, clinging to the original draft, modeled as a majority opinion that would have struck down the whole law. At the end of the thing, they tack on a relatively small opinion to turn it into a dissent.

It looks to me like a lot of intracourt wrangling, coupled with conservative justices counting their chickens before they hatched.