If you paid any attention at all to US politics in the 2010s, you’ll remember the seemingly endless stream of lawsuits seeking to undermine, or even repeal altogether, the Affordable Care Act. Turns out, these suits never ended.

On April 21, the Supreme Court will hear Kennedy v. Braidwood Management, the latest attempt to convince a judiciary dominated by Republicans to sabotage President Barack Obama’s signature legislative achievement.

Unlike some of these earlier lawsuits, Braidwood is not an existential threat to the entire law. Currently, Obamacare gives the Department of Health and Human Services, acting through an institution known as the US Preventive Services Task Force (PSTF), broad authority to require health insurers to cover a wide range of preventative health treatments — from cancer screenings, to medications that prevent the transmission of HIV, to eye ointments that prevent blindness-causing infections in infants.

The plaintiffs in this case, who are represented by former Trump lawyer and anti-abortion crusader Jonathan Mitchell, essentially seek to strip HHS of this authority, thus allowing insurers to deny care for a wide range of treatments they are required to cover by law.

As is often the case in these anti-Obamacare lawsuits, Mitchell essentially argues that the Affordable Care Act and some other relevant health laws should be read to render them — and the PSTF — unconstitutional, and asks the Court to conclude that his reading is the only way to interpret the statute. The government offers a much more plausible interpretation of these laws in its brief.

There are multiple reasons to reject Mitchell’s approach. One is that the Supreme Court has long applied a doctrine, known as “constitutional avoidance,” which says that when a statute is open to multiple interpretations, the Court should avoid choosing one that would render it unconstitutional.

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