Divining the Supreme Court Health Care Arguments There is no tea-leaf reading like Supreme Court tea-leaf reading. And in the immediate aftermath of Tuesday's landmark argument on the constitutionality of the health care law's insurance mandate, there was no shortage of attempted divination among the legal commentariat. The subject of obsessive fascination, not surprisingly, was the every utterance by the two justices considered most in play, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Anthony M. Kennedy. A sampling: Stuart Taylor Jr., a longtime court watcher who writes for National Journal and other publications, participated in an interview with Kaiser Health News. He noted a tonal difference in the questions posed by Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kennedy to Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr., who represented the Obama administration, and those posed to Paul D. Clement and Michael A. Carvin, who argued on behalf of the challenges to the law. "It's clear that the four liberals are going to vote to uphold the law," Mr. Taylor said. The two to watch, who seem up for grabs, were, arguably, Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Anthony Kennedy. Both of them, especially Roberts, were very tough on Don Verrilli, the solicitor general. Here are some samples of Roberts: a hypothetical, on emergency services, could they make us all buy cellphones, the broccoli thing, the car thing, requiring people to buy insurance for pediatric care, people who don't have children, to subsidize others. And most importantly, I suppose, "all bets are off," something he said twice, meaning: If we uphold this, there's nothing Congress won't be able to do." Asked whether the court was equally tough on Mr. Clement, Mr. Taylor answered: "No. Kennedy was a little less hard on Verrilli, but the tenor of his comments was similar to Roberts, that this really can't be limited. Each of them asked kind of musing, philosophical questions of Clement and Carvin that sounded a little more like they were just making sure that all the bases were touched, and they didn't sound so much as though: I'm not buying your argument. On Scotusblog, which provides comprehensive coverage of the court, Lyle Denniston wrote that Mr. Verrilli's presentation left Justice Kennedy in search of a limiting principle to the government's assertion that Congress can require Americans to purchase a commercial product like health insurance. "If Justice Anthony M. Kennedy can locate a limiting principle in the federal government's defense of the new individual health insurance mandate, or can think of one on his own, the mandate may well survive," Mr. Denniston wrote. If he does, he may take Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and a majority along with him. But if he does not, the mandate is gone. That is where Tuesday's argument wound up - with Kennedy, after first displaying a very deep skepticism, leaving the impression that he might yet be the mandate's savior. In The Washington Examiner, Philip Klein suggested that Chief Justice Roberts seemed a likely vote against the mandate. "To be sure," Mr. Klein wrote, "it's theoretically possible Roberts will vote to uphold the law. Some have suggested that he could do so (assuming Kennedy votes to uphold) to make the ruling seem less contentious or to have more control over the drafting of the opinion. But those are different issues. If we're going based on oral arguments, it seems he's very likely to vote to overturn the mandate. Writing for The Volokh Conspiracy, a legal blog, Orin Kerr, a law professor at George Washington University who once was a clerk for Justice Kennedy, found reason for both sides to take hope from his former boss's questions and comments. "It sounds like Justice Kennedy accepts the basic framework of the challengers that mandates are different and especially troubling," Mr. Kerr wrote. Instead of saying that mandates are therefore banned, however, Justice Kennedy would require the government to show some special circumstances justifying the mandate in each case. The unanswered question in this case is whether the special economics of the health care market justifies the mandate here. Andrew Cohen, a contributing editor at The Atlantic, also thought Mr. Kennedy could go either way, and suggested that reports of the mandate's death might be premature. "The initial wisdom from the commentariat coming out of Tuesday's argument, after all the barking by court conservatives, is that the insurance mandate is in trouble," Mr. Cohen wrote. I'm not so sure. The transcript reads better for the feds than the argument sounded. He added: "Credit the law's opponents for a masterful job of obfuscating the details of the measure - and blame the Obama administration and the law's other supporters for failing miserably to adequately explain, on a basic level, what the law does and does not do." Jeffrey Toobin, who writes for The New Yorker and provides legal analysis for CNN, all but declared the mandate dead. "This is a train wreck for the Obama administration," he said on CNN while standing outside the court. This law looks like it's going to be struck down. I'm telling you all of the predictions, including mine, that the justices would not have a problem with this law were wrong. Justice Kennedy, the swing vote, was enormously skeptical. And Dahlia Lithwick, who provides lively coverage of the court for Slate, opined that: President Obama's signature legislative achievement probably rests on the shoulders of two men - Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Anthony Kennedy. Or, to put it differently, everyone else seems to have staked a clear position. The court's four liberals appear poised to uphold the law. Justices Samuel Alito and Antonin Scalia appear ready to strike it down. Justice Clarence Thomas was always assumed to be a vote against the Affordable Care Act and didn't speak today. So, we are left to guess about Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Kennedy, who based on their questions appear to be someplace in the middle. The betting on the steps of the court afterward split among those who suspected the final vote will be 5-4 to strike it down, or 6-3 to uphold it. I didn't hear anyone taking bets on anything in between.