WHAT is the biggest problem that faces Barack Obama in his quest for re-election? Most people would say the economy: stuck in thin-blooded, job-deficient recovery mode, and liable to take a turn for the worse if the news from Europe gets much gloomier. But another, even more immediate, spectre looms. Next week or the week after, the Supreme Court will issue its ruling on Mr Obama's most significant achievement as president, the sweeping reforms he passed in 2010 to America's health-care system. And there is a good chance that Chief Justice John Roberts and his court will strike them down. This, surely, would be a mighty blow to the president's hopes. In an election that, according to most polls, is still extremely close, with a growing number of sizeable states apparently on a knife-edge, much will depend on whose fired-up supporters will flock to the polls and whose will stay sulkily at home. If the Roberts court gives the health-care reforms a coup de grâce, the Republicans would be galvanised; it is, after all, the Republican governors or attorneys-general of 26 states who have brought this lawsuit, and nothing unites the party so much as its opposition to "Obamacare." The Democrats" morale would surely be profoundly shaken, too. Mr Obama can claim, with fair justification, that his actions as president have done a lot to make the recession less deep and painful than it might have been. But these are achievements that are hard to quantify and harder to trumpet when unemployment stands slightly higher than it did when he took office, despite stimulus packages that have helped to increase the national debt by 50%. The president's remark on June 8th that the private sector is "doing fine" was judged a gaffe of the first order by Democrats as well as Republicans. Mr Obama's visible domestic successes have been rather thin on the ground. Bailing out the car industry and ending the practice of sacking open homosexuals from the armed forces both clearly qualify, but affect relatively few people. Health-care reform, as Vice-President Joe Biden remarked when Mr Obama signed it, is a "big fucking deal," and there have not been too many of those in a presidency whose defining characteristic has been partisan gridlock. Yet for all that, it is possible that the Supreme Court, by throwing a spanner into the works, may actually help Mr Obama as much as hurt him. For a start, the Republicans would suddenly find that they have a mess of their own making to sort out. If the Supreme Court does indeed strike down the Affordable Care Act, many popular provisions would fall with it: the one allowing parents to keep their children on their insurance policies until they are 26, for instance, and the abolition of lifetime ceilings on what the sick can claim. Both of those are already in force, and a ban on insurance companies refusing to insure the unwell is due to come in from 2014. Generous subsidies will help not just those who lack insurance, but also some of those who have it and find it hard to afford. And Mr Obama's cost-control mechanisms, imperfect though they are, have a fiscally useful role to play in bringing down the costs of government-provided insurance for the poor and the elderly. Even if only the "mandate" requiring everyone to buy health insurance is struck down as unconstitutional, the consequences of that could cause other parts of the bill to unravel, and would certainly lead to big increases in insurance premiums. One big insurance company has already said it would endeavour to keep some of the popular provisions intact: but it might not be able to. The Republicans have long said that they want to "repeal and replace" Obamacare, but they have been remarkably coy about what they would replace it with. If you break it, as Colin Powell remarked in another context, you own it. So the danger to the Republicans of a backlash should not be discounted. And there is another, greater threat to them. Should Obamacare be struck down or crippled, the Roberts court will be seen by many as politically slanted. Arguably that has happened already, thanks to its recision of gun control in Washington, DC and Chicago in 2008 and 2010, and to its decision in 2010 to scrap limits on corporate (and trade-union) donations to political-action groups. And judgments on other highly political cases, on positive discrimination and on immigration, are expected before the election. Like the gun-control and campaign-finance rulings, these are likely to be "partisan" 5-4 decisions. A poll on June 7th found that 76% of people think that Supreme Court justices are sometimes swayed by their political or personal views, and that only 44% approve of the court's performance. It used to be by far the most popular branch of government. The power of four Therein lies a potential silver lining for Mr Obama. If his rival were to win the presidency, Republicans would control the White House, the House of Representatives, most probably the Senate (the swings that would see Mitt Romney home would flip the Senate as well), and, in the eyes of a great many people, the Supreme Court, too. That is a remarkable concentration of power, and it would come after a ruling that would be the most serious affront to an elected Congress by the court since the 1930s. The decisions the Supreme Court handed down then, overturning key provisions of the New Deal in 1935 and 1936, were a big help to Franklin Roosevelt in his own re-election battle. Ruth Bader Ginsburg, a liberal justice, turns 80 next year, and three more of the nine justices are in their 70s. A President Romney could quite possibly guarantee a conservative court for decades to come. The thought of such an eventuality might really get those Democrats scampering to the polls.