“It’s almost like they’re confessing to some secret vice when they say they don’t think (the law) should be struck down,” said former U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Michael McConnell, a George W. Bush appointee who now teaches at Stanford Law School, referring to some fellow conservatives.

Several legal experts who do not necessarily favor the law, but bet it will survive, point to the decisions of two leading conservative federal appellate judges who already have sided with the Obama administration. The core of its healthcare law is a requirement that most people in the United States buy insurance by 2014…

Wilkinson, who was on George W. Bush’s short list for the Supreme Court, has not presided over any of the challenges to the healthcare law that have made their way through U.S. courts.

But he suggested in a recent book on constitutional theory that the law was valid, subject to Congress’ power to regulate commerce in the states: “The idea that Congress is constitutionally disabled under the commerce power from regulating activity affecting one-sixth of the national economy strikes me as a heavy lift.” Healthcare spending totals more than 17 percent of U.S. gross domestic product.