Up until last Thursday, if you had told any Supreme Court observer that Justice Anthony Kennedy would side with the conservatives and find Obamacare’s individual mandate unconstitutional, he or she would probably have assumed that the law would be struck down. But that’s not how the court ended up ruling.

Instead, the supposedly conservative Chief Justice John Roberts sided with the court’s four liberal members and upheld Obamacare’s individual mandate as a proper use of Congress’ taxing power. Never mind that both Congress and the president had forcefully and repeatedly denied that the individual mandate was a tax.