Bobby Jindal, Chris Christie and Nikki Haley all responded by saying they'll keep fighting. | AP Photos GOP govs aim for health showdown

Republican governors have a message to those now counting the days until the health care reforms are in place: Not so fast.

Going into Thursday, when the conventional wisdom was that the court would strike down the law, the governors said they’d put off action until after the ruling — now they say they’ll pin their hopes on Mitt Romney winning in November and repealing the law.


( See also: Full coverage of the health care reform decision)

Chris Christie, Nikki Haley, Bobby Jindal, Bob McDonnell and Rick Perry all responded to the Supreme Court’s decision by saying they’ll keep fighting — even as the White House on Friday made clear its response: Fine, we’ll do it without you.

The Republican governors’ message was clear on a morning Republican National Committee conference call, when Jindal and McDonnell stressed their continued defiance of the Affordable Care Act and said they will resist implementing the state-based health insurance exchanges for which the law calls.

“Here in Louisiana, look, we refused to set up the exchange. We’re not going to start implementing Obamacare,” Jindal said. “We have not applied for the grants, we have not accepted many of these dollars, we are not implementing the exchanges, we don’t think it makes any sense to implement Obamacare in Louisiana.”

( Also on POLITICO: 6 SCOTUS takeaways)

The response from GOP governors was similar elsewhere. Christie, on his monthly radio call-in show, said he would again veto legislation creating a New Jersey health insurance exchange if his state Legislature passes it.

“I am in no hurry to do that, and especially because we have an election four months away,” Christie said when asked if he would allow for the creation of a state exchange. “If there are any hard deadlines that New Jersey has to comply with or be in violation of the law, we’ll comply with it. But I don’t think you are going to see any of those things between now and November.”

McDonnell said that in Virginia — where lawmakers have already adopted language authorizing but not yet creating a health insurance exchange — twice didn’t answer direct questions about whether he would seek to have his state implement an exchange. Instead, he told reporters on the RNC call, that states like his will have decisions to make.

“Each state now needs to decide whether or not it makes sense to enact its Medicaid expansion, which of course comes with a cost of a real hit to Medicare as well as the very likely flight of people from small-business policies now into a government-run Medicaid program,” said McDonnell, who is prevented by state law from seeking reelection.

Haley, who served as a key Romney surrogate as he campaigned in South Carolina, “already made the decision not to implement an exchange,” spokesman Rob Godfrey said.

Rick Perry in Texas “has absolutely no interest in accelerating the implementation of Obamacare” and will not create a health insurance exchange, spokeswoman Catherine Frazier said.

The Obama administration sent a clear message Friday that it is prepared to begin creating state-by-state health insurance exchanges in places where politicians hostile to the Affordable Care Act refuse to do so.

A White House official stressed that Republican governors’ resistance to the law will be no barrier to the creation of the exchanges. All 50 states, the official said, will have exchanges by 2014.

“We intend to work with any state that’s moving forward to set up a model, whether it’s a state-based exchange, a partnership with our federal exchange … or operating a federal exchange within their state,” said Mike Hash, the interim director of the Health and Human Services Department’s Center for Consumer Information and Insurance Oversight.

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, echoing a talking point pushed by the president and his reelection campaign, urged those opposed to health care reform to accept it and work within the law.

“What we can’t afford to do is spend any more time refighting political battles or go back to the time when insurance companies operated without accountability,” Sebelius said.

Obama’s campaign sought to reinforce that message. Gov. Martin O’Malley of Maryland, on a campaign conference call with reporters, pushed the idea that refusing to arrange exchanges is an idea as crazy as secession.

“Some of our colleagues would like to get out of being members of the union,” O’Malley said. “And by that, I mean the United States, so I think, who can predict what some of the ewoks on their side of the aisle will chase, I don’t know.”

Later, the Maryland governor, chairman of the Democratic Governors Association and possible 2016 presidential candidate, tossed another bomb at McDonnell, his Republican Governors Association counterpart.

“I understand Gov. McDonnell’s difficulty in getting things through his Legislature now,” O’Malley said. “Apparently the only, the only health care mandates they can embrace are trans-vaginal probes for women.”

But not every Republican governor is threatening to boycott the exchanges. In Michigan, Gov. Rick Snyder, a Romney surrogate there, called for his state Legislature to create an exchange to ensure the state has control over how its exchange works.

“While I may not agree with everything in the law, now that the Supreme Court has essentially upheld the act, we must act quickly to avoid an undue burden on Michigan residents and job providers,” Snyder said Thursday. “Working with our legislative leaders to establish the MiHealth Marketplace will allow Michiganders to make decisions regarding what will be covered as opposed to Washington, D.C., making those decisions for us. It will also allow us to draw down federal dollars to assist with the costs of complying with the law.”

Snyder’s defection may be the first crack in a unified Republican opposition to implementing any parts of the law, but the party’s problems in continuing to attack President Barack Obama’s reforms was evident in one Jindal mis-speak Friday.

On the RNC call, the Louisiana governor nearly used “Obamneycare,” the June 2011 epithet authored by Tim Pawlenty — then a presidential candidate, now a top Romney surrogate — meant to mock the similarities between Romney’s health legislation in Massachusetts and Obama’s reforms.

“There’s only one candidate, Gov. Romney, who’s committed that he will appeal the Obamney, the Obamacare tax increase,” Jindal told reporters.

Meanwhile, the Koch brothers-backed Americans for Prosperity announced Friday that it will spend $9 million branding the health reform law as a tax increase, using much of the same language as did Jindal and McDonnell on the morning’s conference call, which was arranged by the Republican National Committee.

The Obama campaign sought to downplay the GOP argument that health care reform represents a major, broad-based tax increase — an attack that picks up on the legal logic Chief Justice John Roberts used in his decision Thursday to vote for upholding the law.

Both Obama and Romney are using the ruling to raise campaign funds. Late Thursday night, the @barackobama Twitter handle directed followers to a link to purchase $30 T-shirts emblazoned with the phrase “Health Reform Still a BFD,” a reference to Vice President Joe Biden’s famous remark to the president upon the bill’s signing in 2010.

At the same time, Romney’s campaign is hawking T-shirts on its website declaring that “Elections have consequences. Obamacare survived. It falls on November 6th.”

Romney’s spokeswoman, Andrea Saul, said that in the first 24 hours after the court’s decision, the campaign raised $4.6 million from 47,000 online donations. Comparable figures from the Obama campaign were not made available Friday, though spokesman Ben LaBolt said the president has “outraised” Romney.

“It’s perverse that Mitt Romney wont share details about what he’d do for the millions he’d leave uninsured or at the whims of insurance companies when he ‘kills Obamacare dead,’ but he’ll share the hourly details of his fundraising after the Supreme Court ruling,” LaBolt said. “We’ve outraised the Romney campaign in that time period but that’s not the point — our supporters are more committed than ever to ensuring that insurance companies can’t drop coverage for people who get sick or discriminate against people with pre-existing conditions by reelecting the president.”

For his part, Romney, speaking to donors at a Midtown Manhattan fundraiser on Friday morning, suggested a complacency about health care reform, saying that “many people assumed” the Supreme Court would strike down the law.

Now, Romney said, the work will fall to his supporters.

“What happened yesterday calls for greater urgency, I believe, in the election,” Romney told the New York donors. “I think people recognize that if you want to replace Obamacare, you’ve got to replace President Obama. And the urgency of doing that is something which is galvanizing people across the county. I think many people assumed that the Supreme Court would do the work that was necessary in repealing Obamacare. It did not get that job done.”

Mike Allen contributed to this report.