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Welcome to Amicus, Slate Supreme Court podcast. I'm Dahlia Lithwick, Slate Supreme Court correspondent, and welcome to June, or as we court watchers like to think of it, the nerd Super Bowl. In the next four weeks, the biggest decisions of the 2014 term will rain down upon us.

And today on the show, we're going to try to take a look at what's at stake in some of these monster cases.

Later on in the show, we're going to consider the wave of abortion cases that might be soon heading toward the Supreme Court.

But first, we want to take stock of the big cases that are already there. Now, you may remember that on the very first episode of this podcast, we were lucky enough to be joined by

veteran Supreme Court Watcher and practitioner Tom Goldstein, the publisher of SCOTUS blog,

and he predicted that the court was going to hear this little sleeper case called King versus

Purwell, and they did. So we wanted to have you back, Tom, to do maybe a little I Told You So Dance, and to tell us what is going to happen. So Tom, thank you for coming back to the show. Are you kidding? Thank you so much for having me. The wonderful thing about predictions is that you can make a ton of them. And then when one comes true, You can go, I told you so. And we can just forget about all the ones I got wrong. Well, why don't you start by saying, I told you so? We were talking about King the very, very beginning of October. Tell us, let's start there. We're waiting for that to come down. It's a big, big deal of a case.

Can you just briefly summarize what this Obamacare 2.0 is about?

You bet. So a few years ago, everybody who's listening to this podcast at least will remember the constitutional challenge to ObamaCare whether Congress had the power to pass that law.

This is not a case like that one. Instead, it's a question of

whether there's effectively a glitch in the statute that blows the thing up. So the heart and

beating soul of the ACA are these subsidies because the subsidies that are given out to lower

income individuals who want to buy health care,

bring them into the insurance pool and allow the insurers to know that they have a good

number of healthy people that they're providing insurance to who probably won't need a ton

of care. So everything really turns on the subsidies, but the statute says that you're

eligible for the subsidies if you purchase insurance

on a health exchange, which is how the purchases are made, established by a state. Now, in the wake

of Republican opposition and Tea Party opposition to the ACA, a bunch of those exchanges were

...