Walter Dellinger, a former acting solicitor general and one of the health-care law’s most ardent constitutional cheerleaders, has long predicted that the vote upholding the legislation will be lopsided and that Roberts will be in the majority to write the opinion. (When on the prevailing side, the chief justice writes the opinion or chooses the colleague who gets the job.)

“The reason I think Chief Justice Roberts will write the opinion is because I think he will want to write a narrow opinion,” Dellinger said. It would recognize that there are limits on Congress’s powers, he said, but that the Constitution’s commerce clause is fully met in a law that deals with the “intimately intertwined” issues of health care, insurance and interstate markets…

Verrilli seems to think he has found another way to make the conservative justices comfortable: the opinion of Judge Jeffrey Suttonof the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit, a former Scalia clerk and a conservative well-known to the justices. Sutton’s court was one of two appeals panels that have upheld the health-care law in the dozens of cases challenging it.

Sutton gently questions the wisdom of the law but concludes that it is within Congress’s powers to make such decisions.

This is exactly what the Obama administration would like the Supreme Court to find.