What can explain liberals’ widespread failure to anticipate the Court’s wariness of the mandate? Research conducted by University of Virginia psychologist Jonathan Haidt suggests one possible answer: Liberals just aren’t as good as conservatives and libertarians at understanding how their opponents think. Haidt helped conduct research that asked respondents to fill out questionnaires about political narratives—first responding based on their own beliefs, but then responding as if trying to mimic the beliefs of their political opponents. “The results,” he writes in the May issue of Reason, “were clear and consistent.” Moderates and conservatives were the most able to think like their liberal political opponents. “Liberals,” he reports, “were the least accurate, especially those who describe themselves as ‘very liberal.’”

Liberals, on the other hand, have a different theory. The Court is just a bunch of partisan hacks who’ve bought into the most extreme ideas of the Republican base. Lithwick has argued that despite the law’s self-evident constitutionality, the decision has “everything to do with optics, politics, and public opinion.” Harvard law professor and former Solicitor General Charles Fried, who signed an amicus brief arguing in favor of the law, huffed that “the whole thing is just a canard that’s been invented by the tea party and [anti-mandate legal architect] Randy Barnetts of the world, and I was astonished to hear it coming out of the mouths of the people on that bench.”

The liberal position on the Court seems to be that as long as it accepts their arguments, it’s an independent legal arbiter. But whenever it doesn’t, it’s a partisan political enforcer.