Justice Ginsburg: Those who are guessing what the court will do don't know what there talking about

[The Second Stone]

10. The OP context should have had "they're"

as a contraction of they are. The possessive is "their" and the preposition is "there". So there.

They take a preliminary vote shortly after the oral argument, and then assign the opinions to be written at that meeting. The Chief Justice assigns the opinion to the side he is on, and the longest tenured justice on the other side assigns it for that side. They can and do change their votes.

Their voting is rather predictable. Traditional justices (pre-Scalia) would be highly predictable to follow opinions that they had earlier written, signed on or cited. The Scalia crowd votes like a Republican legislator and reasons as if they were consistently following their previous decisions, with gaps in logic to cover the differences.

I predict that they uphold it, and question the individual mandate, but don't overturn it because nobody who was litigating had the "standing" to argue on behalf of an individual. So they will leave it intact, with the very strong suggestion that a person could not in fact be required to buy the insurance, but that they wouldn't strike down the law of one individual did complain.