Putting Amy Coney Barrett on the Supreme Court would appear to be bad news for the Affordable Care Act and the tens of millions of Americans who depend on it.

Just how bad? Thats difficult to say.

President Donald Trump announced Barretts nomination on Saturday. With a quick Senate confirmation, she could be on the bench Nov. 10 , when the court plans to hear California v. Texas , a lawsuit calling on the justices to wipe the Affordable Care Act off the books.

And although Barrett hasnt said a lot about the health care law, her one major comment came in a 2017 law review article , when she said a previous decision upholding the law pushed the Affordable Care Act beyond its plausible meaning to save the statute.

The author of that ruling was Chief Justice John Roberts, who joined the four liberals in allowing most of the program to stand. Its a pretty clear sign that, had Barrett been on the bench then, she would have voted with the other Republican-appointed justices and said Obamacare was unconstitutional.

But in predicting how Barrett would approach this challenge, there is one complicating factor. Most experts consider the new case, which comes from a group of Republican state officials and has the backing of the Trump administration, to be a lot weaker.

Finding a respectable legal expert who will vouch for it on the merits is nearly impossible . Before the death last week of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, most informed observers expected the case to fail and possibly to fail big, with some and maybe even most of the other conservative justices joining Roberts and the liberals in turning it away.

But California v. Texas is coming before the Supreme Court because three federal judges, one from a federal district in Texas and two on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit , already found its logic compelling. All three are Republican appointees, which almost certainly helps explain why they ruled as they did. Obamacare has been the subject of relentless attacks and the object of monomaniacal hatred on the political right since President Barack Obama signed it in 2010.

The question now is whether Barrett brings similar feelings to the case and whether shes the kind of judge who thinks the quality of legal arguments matters.

The Bonkers Argument Now Threatening Obamacare

The issue at the heart of California v. Texas is the Affordable Care Acts individual mandate, which was also at issue in the 2012 ruling Barrett criticized.

The Affordable Care Act initially imposed a financial penalty on people who elected not to have health insurance coverage. In the previous case, called NFIB v. Sebelius , conservative lawyers backed by the Republican Party said Congress had no authority to impose that kind of penalty. Roberts and the four liberal justices disagreed, arguing that the penalty was just another form of taxation, which the Constitution clearly permits.

That settled the issue or at least it did until 2017, when Trump and the Republicans in Congress eliminated the penalty as part of their tax legislation that year. It didnt actually strike the mandate language; it simply reduced the penalty to $0.

That prompted the new lawsuit, which comes from Republican state officials across the country and which, in a highly unusual move, the Trump administration now supports.

If the penalty is $0, then it cant be a tax, these Republican officials argue. And if the mandate isnt a tax anymore, then the mandate is an unconstitutional command to purchase insurance. And if the mandate is unconstitutional, they say, the rest of the law is, too, because the features of the Affordable Care Act are so intertwined. Congress, they say, did not intend for the rest of the program to operate without this essential piece.

The flaws in the argument are not difficult to spot, even for somebody with no legal training. Its quite a stretch to say that the mandate is now an unconstitutional command to get insurance when the consequence for defying it is literally nothing and when there is no mechanism of enforcement because there is no fine to collect.

As for congressional intent, the lawmakers who voted to zero out the mandate in 2017 were fully aware that they were removing a piece of the program while letting the law stand and they were quite obviously OK with that, because that is how they voted.

Several Republican lawmakers have said as much. Among them is Lamar Alexander , the retiring senator from Tennessee who is chairman of a committee with direct jurisdiction over the health care law. I am not aware of a single senator who said they were voting to repeal Obamacare when they voted to eliminate the individual mandate penalty, he said last year.