Republicans didn’t get what they wanted Thursday from the Supreme Court when it declined to overturn or otherwise rule against Obamacare. But they did get one thing: a talking point.

After the decision was handed down Thursday morning, a chorus of conservatives offered a giant “I told you so.” Democrats had warned that justices such as Brett M. Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett would go to the court and overturn Roe v. Wade and Obamacare, with Obamacare being the focal point in their fight against Barrett.

But both voted with the majority Thursday, leaving Obamacare intact.

The National Review’s Dan McLaughlin ran through examples of Democrats’ predictions in a piece titled, “Justice Amy Coney Barrett Proves Democrats’ Obamacare Doomsaying Wrong.”

Among the big ones: now-Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) having said a vote for Barrett was “a vote to strike down the Affordable Care Act,” and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) calling Barrett a “judicial torpedo” aimed at that law.

Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) summed up the results succinctly: “They directly imputed that the justice was nominated for that express purpose, and knew better. They lied, lied, lied.”

There is no question that predicting how a justice might rule in a general topic area — without even knowing the specifics of a case — is a fraught and highly political exercise. Democrats, no question, wanted to hold up and even hyperbolized the impending potential demise of Obamacare and Roe to give moderate Republicans pause in voting for Barrett.

But this is a somewhat odd exercise, for a couple of reasons.

The first is that this opinion was extremely narrow. The court didn’t rule on the merits, but rather ruled that those who brought the case didn’t have “standing” — i.e. they couldn’t prove they would suffer injury connected to what they claimed was an illegal law. This majority featured seven justices overall and two of President Donald Trump’s nominees, Barrett and Kavanaugh, while a third Trump nominee, Neil M. Gorsuch, dissented.

Sure, if the driving goals of Barrett and Kavanaugh, in their heart of hearts, was to overturn Obamacare, they could have come to a different decision on standing. But this wasn’t just some esoteric reason to avoid making hard decisions; the opinion they signed on to made clear they worried that granting standing in this case would have opened the floodgates to judges overturning laws (including, logically, ones they might favor).

“The matter is not simply technical,” the opinion states, adding: “It would threaten to grant unelected judges a general authority to conduct oversight of decisions of the elected branches of Government.”

But the second and perhaps more important point here is that Democrats weren’t the only ones suggesting that the likes of Barrett would do things like overturn Obamacare; so too did Trump and the GOP, in a way.

Dating back to the 2016 campaign, Trump repeatedly suggested that his justices would indeed rule the way he wanted on issues like the Affordable Care Act and abortion.

“If I win the presidency, my judicial appointments will do the right thing unlike Bush’s appointee Roberts on ObamaCare,” Trump tweeted in 2015.

Trump in 2016 again held up Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. as an example of Republicans stupidly installing Supreme Court justices who refused to overturn Obamacare: “Ted Cruz, along with Jeb Bush, pushed Justice John Roberts onto the Supreme Court. Roberts could have killed ObamaCare twice, but didn’t!” The implication, clearly, was that Trump wouldn’t make the same mistake.

Trump also was adamant during the campaign that he would have a litmus test on both the Second Amendment and Roe. He even again predicted that his nominees would vote to overturn the latter.

At an October 2016 general-election debate, Trump was asked about overturning Roe and said, “Well, if we put another two or perhaps three justices on, that’s really what’s going to be — that will happen. And that’ll happen automatically, in my opinion, because I am putting pro-life justices on the court. I will say this: It will go back to the states, and the states will then make a determination.”

So if Democrats “lied” about Trump’s justices overturning things like Obamacare, what word might we use for Trump having predicted such things?

Of course, Republicans have long treated Trump’s unhelpful past comments more like the rantings of an Internet troll than the statements of an American president. But it wasn’t just Trump. The 2016 Republican Party platform, which the party kept for 2020, said the country needed a Republican president appointing justices to enable the courts “to begin to reverse the long line of activist decisions including Roe, Obergefell” — the landmark ruling legalizing same-sex marriage — “and the Obamacare cases.” Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) also declared before Barrett’s nomination that he had an explicit litmus test requiring that nominees regard Roe as invalid precedent. Barrett satisfied that litmus test, in Hawley’s mind, and he voted for her.

Democrats weren’t totally freelancing on Barrett and Obamacare specifically, either. In her own writings, Barrett had criticized the substance of Roberts’s Obamacare decision, writing in 2017 that Roberts had “pushed the Affordable Care Act beyond its plausible meaning to save the statute.” That didn’t mean she would definitely vote to overturn the law, as Democrats claimed, but it was stronger evidence than we generally see in these hearings.

Even as recently as January, Trump seemed to bemoan the lack of compliance from his Supreme Court nominees — particularly in the court’s decision not to take up a far-fetched attempt to overturn the election. Trump wagered not that they did this because of their independence, but because they felt pressured by claims they were Trump’s, in his words, “puppets.”

“Because they hate that it’s not good in the social circuit,” Trump said in his speech shortly before the Jan. 6 Capitol riot. “And the only way they get out is to rule against Trump. So, let’s rule against Trump, and they do that.”

Just because Trump promised his nominees would do things like overturn Roe and Obamacare or even might have expected it, of course, doesn’t mean it was set in stone. History has taught us that justices often surprise us. But given Trump’s own commentary on these issues — along with the GOP’s stated position in its platform and the words of Hawley and Barrett herself — it didn’t exactly seem unfair to raise it as a question or even a strong possibility.

Nor should we treat narrow rulings on standing as the be-all, end-all when it comes to the independence of justices.