Kinda sounding like a party-line vote on this one... again. If Kennedy is the swing guy, then he has to recognize - and he asked about it - that the mandate was critical to the law so that the healthy would not opt out... and therefore take ‘profitable’ people out of the national health system.
So without the mandate, the entire financial house of cards falls (okay, yeah, like I didn’t know it was all a crock of cooked numbers anyway). But certainly the votes would have been missing otherwise.
[continuing with Justice Dept. lawyer Kneedler]
[source: twitter.com, WSJ’s Kendall, via @janetadamy, #supremecourt tag]
WSJ’s Kendall: Roberts asks what should happen to rest of the law if court strikes down the law’s expansion of Medicaid.
Kneedler says that if the court strikes down the Medicaid expansion, other provisions should remain in place.
Kennedy asks whether court has competence to decide in detail if certain provisions of the law should stay/fall
—Personal Comment: DING! (See also - bold comment from Scalia above)
Scalia suggests never has been SC case where justices struck down the heart of a law but left the rest in place.