Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said Mr. Clement is asking the Court to conduct “a wrecking operation,” before stating that “the more conservative approach would be salvage rather than throwing out everything.” The Obama Administration didn’t say exactly that, but it did argue that the mandate is indispensable to its supposedly well-oiled regulatory scheme and if it is thrown out the insurance rules should be too.

But Justice Anthony Kennedy doubted Justice Ginsburg’s logic, since by taking out only the individual mandate the Court would in effect be creating a new law that Congress “did not provide for, did not consider.” To wit, costs would soar without any mechanism to offset them.

“When you say judicial restraint,” Justice Kennedy said, “you are echoing the earlier premise that it increases the judicial power if the judiciary strikes down other provisions of the act. I suggest to you it might be quite the opposite.” Overturning the mandate alone, he continued, “can be argued at least to be a more extreme exercise of judicial power than to strike the whole.”