The case against King, by Scalia, Kennedy et al

The plaintiffs in King v. Burwell claim that the ACA's creators intended to coerce states into setting up their own exchanges by authorizing state-established exchanges alone to credit subsidies to buyers -- denying that power to the backup federal exchange.

In response to this manifestly absurd assertion of intent, the law's supporters have pointed out that no one involved in the law's design, passage or implementation understood such coercion to exist; that laws that make federal grants to the states conditional on specific state action invariably spell out the consequences of non-participation; that the ACA's clear intent is to provide near-universal coverage; and that the ACA's core provisions were designed to be interdependent, so that denying subsidies to residents of some states would render the law inoperable.

On  all of these points, no participant has been so eloquent as the four dissenting Supreme Court justices in NFIB v. Sebelius, the suit challenging the law's constitutionality, who asserted that the entire law should be struck down.

In their dissent, Justices Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas and Alito argued repeatedly that to strike down any core provision -- e.g., the individual mandate or the Medicaid expansion -- was to thwart the intent of the law's creators and render the remaining parts of the law unworkable -- hence the imperative to strike down the whole law.

Abbe Gluck has highlighted the dissenters' most direct assertions of interdependence of parts, laying particular stress on their observation that the law's "system of incentives collapses if the federal subsidies are invalidated" because without the subsidies, "the exchanges would not operate as Congress intended and may not operate at all" (dissent, p. 60).

Equally striking is the dissenters' argument that making the Medicaid expansion fully voluntary, as the Court majority did, would also thwart Congress's manifest intent to provide universal coverage and would thus render the entire scheme unworkable.

Misrepresentation of the mandate in the Supreme Court: why it still matters

I have made the case below piecemeal, across many posts. This is an attempt to make it as succinctly and completely as possible.
---
In his oral argument against the constitutionality of the ACA's individual mandate on March 27, plaintiff's counsel Michael Carvin asserted, "Congress prohibits anyone over 30 from buying any kind of catastrophic health insurance" (p. 105).

That is not true -- the ACA provides the catastrophic coverage option for others exempt from the mandate, e.g. on grounds of financial hardship. And that factual error signals a greater distortion, one that was not countered and apparently made a major impression on Justices Alito, Roberts and Scalia: that the mandate forces Americans to buy coverage greatly in excess of what's required to offset the cost of catastrophic care for those lacking health insurance. No one pointed out that a) the ACA provides a catastrophic coverage option for those under 30; b) that it extends that option to others exempt from the mandate on financial or other grounds; or c) that the bronze plans offered in the exchanges, as the Kaiser Family Foundation recently detailed, might also reasonably be labeled "catastrophic" coverage.

It seems to me that a) the justices were misled on this potentially crucial point, and b) Kennedy and/or another might still be convinced, if not to accept the mandate as constructed, to divide the baby by further limiting it -- as Marty Lederman suggested they might:

If you were a Supreme Court justice...

Joan Biskupic, on of Reuters' Supreme Court reporters, has a circumspect article about how vain it is to speculate about how the Court will rule on the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act.

Of course, salted into the nutritious helping of info about the Court's august procedures for guarding confidentiality are two bits of well-sourced speculation, one on each side.  The second set me off on a thought experiment. Here it is:

Tom Goldstein, a Washington lawyer and founder of the website SCOTUSblog, said he briefly thought he was observing a sign when he argued a case before the nine justices on April 16 - their first day back after the late March healthcare hearing. When the justices ascended the bench, Goldstein thought the four liberals seemed in particularly fine moods.

He caught himself thinking - only fleetingly - that their good spirits might have meant a majority had voted to uphold the law. "But," added Goldstein, "it flashed through my mind just as quickly that what I saw meant nothing."

Four justices, one mood. That set me thinking about the degree to which actual legal arguments are likely to have an effect. So then I thought: suppose I were one of the nine -- with my existing political propensities. Before I'd read any of the case pleadings, how open would I be to persuasion by the plaintiffs?