Second, Heckler is mostly concerned with giving agencies the space to make “discretionary judgment[s] concerning the allocation of enforcement resources.” The administration’s decision to stop deporting DREAMers, for example, can be defended as that kind of judgment. With millions of people in violation of the immigration laws, it’s sensible to devote limited resources to deporting the worst offenders. Here, in contrast, the fix doesn’t really have anything to do with resource allocation. Wedging it into the Heckler rule may therefore be hard.

Third, Heckler’s general assumption that agencies have enforcement discretion can be rebutted where a statute constrains that discretion. Here, the ACA probably does. On Thursday, the president acknowledged that he was trying to “fix” the ACA’s grandfather clause, which, in his view, was drafted too narrowly. But doesn’t that clause stand as persuasive evidence that the plans that it covers are the only ones that Congress wanted to grandfather? Whatever the scope of its enforcement discretion, the administration probably can’t exercise that discretion to deliberately rewrite the statute.

Fourth, the D.C. Circuit has suggested that Heckler should be confined to “single-shot” decisions not to enforce against small, discrete sets of violators. In words that seem pertinent here, the court has said that “an agency’s pronouncement of a broad policy against enforcement poses special risks that it has consciously and expressly adopted a general policy that is so extreme as to amount to an abdication of its statutory responsibilities.” Distinguishing between single-shot decisions and broad policies isn’t as easy as you might think—even the agency choice at issue in Heckler wasn’t, strictly speaking, a single-shot decision. But the breadth of the fix is another strike against it.