The Supreme Court on Thursday upheld the Affordable Care Act after Texas, joined by 17 other states andd former President Donald Trump, tried to have it declared unconstitutional.

The court found that Texas the other challengers did not standing to challenge the law because it could not show “a past or future injury” connected to the parts of

Obamacare that they wanted declared unconstitutional. Justice Ste phe n Breyer wrote the majority opinion for the 7-2 decision. Justice Clarence Thomas concurred

Justice Neil Gorsuch dissented, joined by Justice Samuel Alito.

Breyer noted in his opinion that the court "proceeded no further than the standing" in its consideration of the case That means that the court did not examine the act’s constitutionality, a blow to Republicans who have crusaded against it for more than a decade. Breyer added that argument that Texas used to challenge the act’s constitutionality was the one that undid its standing. That argument, which the justices discussed in detail about a week after the presidential election, was that because Congress in 2017 set the

individual mandate to zero, meaning people were no longer required to pay a minimum tax for health insurance, the entire law’s legitimacy is in question. Trump’s team made this case in tandem with a Texas-led coalition.

Their argument rested on the idea that the individual mandate is not severable from the rest of the act, meaning that if it is unconstitutional, then so is the rest of Obamacare.

But Breyer wrote in his opinion that if the mandate is set at zero, then there is no way that any of the states could be suffering “fairly traceable” harm from its lack of enforcement.

“With the penalty zeroed out, the IRS can no longer seek a penalty from those who fail to comply,” Breyer wrote. “Because of this, there is no possible government action that is causally connected to the plaintiffs’ injury — the costs of purchasing health insurance.”

Thomas wrote that he essentially agreed with Breyer. Thomas, however, noted that the decision had nothing to do with the quality of the act, commenting that in the past “the court has gone to great lengths to rescue the Act from its own text.”

“Today’s result is thus not the consequence of the Court once again rescuing the Act, but rather of us adjudicating the particular claims the plaintiffs chose to bring,” Thomas wrote.

Alito disagreed, writing that the case was the third installment in the court’s “Affordable Care Act trilogy.” Alito said he was frustrated that whenever a case is brought against Obamacare, it seems the court is always able to pull off an “improbable rescue.”

The decision to throw the case out because of a lack of standing diverged from many of the arguments made in November, when many justices signaled during arguments that if they found fault with the individual mandate, they would simply cut it out and leave the rest of the act in place.

“This is a straightforward case for severability under our precedents,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh told a lawyer defending Obamacare, “meaning that we would excise the mandate and leave the rest of the act in place.”

When President Joe Biden took office, his administration changed tack in the case, informing the court that it did not agree with the previous administration’s opinions on severability. Biden was one of the act’s biggest cheerleaders while he was former President Barack Obama’s vice president.

The court previously upheld the individual mandate in the 2012 case National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius, arguing that its power and, by extension, the legitimacy of the entire act, lay in Congress’s taxing power.