Predicting the outcome is a guessing game, and a perilous one. | AP Photos SCOTUS win-lose scenarios

As the climactic Supreme Court announcement nears, all of Washington is on the edge of their seats.

Will President Barack Obama’s entire health law go down Thursday? Just the individual mandate? Will the whole thing be upheld? Will the decision be 5-4, or 6-3, or — don’t faint, pundits — 4-2-3?


Predicting the outcome is a guessing game and a perilous one. But every Washington player worth his or her salt has a game plan for all possible scenarios.

Here’s a pregame look at the best- and worst-case results for key participants in the health-care reform saga — and how they’ll try to spin the decision to the hilt:

President Barack Obama

Best case: The law is upheld in full.

The health law is unquestionably the signature legislative achievement of Obama’s presidency and his most consequential legacy. While the public remains split on the wisdom of the legislation, a court ruling backing the law’s constitutionality would be seen by many Americans as a stamp of approval, even if the justices insist in the finer print that they’re not endorsing the merits of the measure.

Some pundits have spun out various counterintuitive scenarios that involve Obama benefiting politically from a ruling viewed as overtly partisan, but in a case of this magnitude such analyses are too clever by half. Nothing succeeds like success.

Worst case: The court strikes down the entire Affordable Care Act.

Simply a nightmare for Obama. It would mean he effectively wasted the bulk of his political capital, nearly a year of his presidency and good chunk of the time his party controlled both houses of Congress. Much of the rest of Obama’s agenda — including immigration reform, closing Guantanamo and climate change legislation — was sacrificed for health care reform.

Walking away from those priorities for what turned out — behind door No. 3 — to be nothing, would be portrayed as one of the greatest political miscalculations by a president in modern times.

“That’s not where you want to be. That’s not where you want your president to be,” former Attorney General and White House counsel Alberto Gonzales said Wednesday on CNN. “If I’m in the White House, I want to win this case.”

Jeff Shesol, a former White House speechwriter and author of “Supreme Power: Franklin Roosevelt v. the Supreme Court,” said Roosevelt gained political leverage against unfavorable rulings by the justices because he had most Americans on his side. That’s not true for Obama. “I don’t think the public’s with him [on the individual mandate], and I don’t think any amount of effort by him is going to counter that,” Shesol said.

Even a mixed verdict would be pretty grim for Obama. If the justices strike down the mandate but leave other parts of the law, it would support Republican arguments that Obama had overreached but would at least leave him with some politically popular measures to campaign on.

Mitt Romney

Best case: Nothing would energize Romney’s supporters and give his campaign more focus than the Supreme Court upholding the Affordable Care Act.

Such a ruling would give Romney license to spend the next four months railing exclusively against Obama’s health law, rather than being forced to explain how he would address health care.

“He hasn’t done it so far because why would you get off the message of ‘Obamacare’?” said GOP operative Chip Saltsman, who ran Mike Huckabee’s 2008 campaign. “That’s a winning message, ‘I want to repeal “Obamacare”.’ There’s not much else you have to say.”

Worst case: If justices repeal either the mandate or the whole law, Romney will have to get specific about his own plans. He may also have to explain why he supports a ruling that knocks out popular elements of the health law.

Romney would immediately seek to change the subject back to the president, arguing that Obama has squandered his term by passing and defending an unconstitutional law while the economy faltered.

“If ‘Obamacare’ is not deemed constitutional, then the first three-and-a-half years of this president’s term will have been wasted on something that has not helped the American people,” Romney told an audience in Virginia on Tuesday.

House Speaker John Boehner

Best case: The court partially dismantles the law.

If justices toss the mandate but uphold other parts of the law, Boehner and House Republicans will spend much of the rest of 2012 passing legislation that repeals every remaining piece. That drive will continue to resonate with the GOP base.

Worst case: The whole law is struck down.

House Republicans get a told-ya-so moment but are left with little role in the process and no rallying cry for the faithful. Leaders have said they have no intention of moving health care legislation to restore politically popular measures such as guaranteeing coverage for pre-existing conditions, so it’s possible they could share the blame as hard-luck stories emerge in the wake of the court’s ruling.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi

Best c ase: The court upholds the law entirely.

The House minority leader did more to get the health care law passed than many of the other players. She wrangled the House to push through the Senate version of the bill after Sen. Scott Brown’s win in Massachusetts broke the Democrats’ filibuster-proof majority. Her troops paid a price when 52 Democrats lost their seats in the 2010 election. Since then, Pelosi has repeatedly stated the law is “iron-clad” constitutionally and predicted the court will uphold it 6-3. If the court strikes it down, expect to see Democratic leadership insist the court voted politically.

Worst case: The law is partially or entirely struck down.

If the law goes away, all of the blood, sweat and tears Pelosi and her team put into passing it could be for nothing.

Pelosi’s legacy is inextricably linked to the law. So even if just the mandate is struck down, expect her to talk about the legislation’s popular benefits — no discrimination for people with pre-existing conditions and the provision that allows young people to stay on their parents’ insurance — as Democratic ideas she pushed through that Republicans want to do away with.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid

Best case: The law is completely upheld. And then everyone shuts up about it, already.

Reid was the driving force behind the Senate’s Christmas Eve passage of the health care bill in 2009. He cajoled, cut deals and persuaded wayward Democrats to back the plan during a nonstop series of meetings.

But those days are a distant memory for the wily Senate majority leader. Now he cares mainly about one thing: his chances of keeping Democrats in control of the Senate in the next Congress. Reid will look at how the Supreme Court’s ruling will affect Democrats in battleground states — whether Claire McCaskill in Missouri, Jon Tester in Montana, Tim Kaine in Virginia, Sherrod Brown in Ohio or Tammy Baldwin in Wisconsin. And the Democrats will quickly look to shift the conversation back to more fertile territory — Romney and his position on the individual mandate when he was governor of Massachusetts.

Worst case: A muddled result that leads to a protracted election-year debate over what should be added to or removed from the law.

Solicitor General Donald Verrilli

Best case: The law stands.

Verrilli drew a heap of criticism for what critics called a stumbling, unfocused performance at the oral arguments in March. He “choked on a drink of water,” as The New York Times put it. Others were less charitable, suggesting he simply choked. However, victory has a thousand fathers, so that would be all but forgotten if the health care law scores a big win.

Worst case: A sweeping ruling striking down the entire law might be better for Verrilli than having the justices pick and choose parts of it to reject. If the justices were determined to knock out the whole law, there’s probably little Verrilli could have done to stop them regardless of his performance.

Jeffrey Toobin

Best case: The whole law falls.

CNN legal analyst and New Yorker writer Jeffrey Toobin raced to the Supreme Court steps after the oral arguments on the mandate to declare that the White House’s goose was cooked. “This was a train wreck for the Obama administration,” Toobin proclaimed. “This law looks like it’s going to be struck down, I’m telling you.”

Toobin’s comments set off a panic in some Washington circles. Other pundits also thought the law had an unexpectedly rocky time, but few were so emphatic and definitive. They also noted that justices sometimes ask tough questions or make remarks that suggest one view, but end up voting the other way.

A bruising decision from the justices would be a vindication for Toobin.

Worst case: The court upholds the law. If it turns out Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Anthony Kennedy were just playing to the stands with their combative questioning of Verrilli, Toobin will have egg on his face.

The insurance industry

Best case: The mandate is struck along with new requirements for insurers. Insurance companies could end up getting the best of both worlds — at least for a short time. Consumers will still get subsidies to help them buy insurance, which benefits the industry, and the insurers won’t have to live under the new rule that they accept all applicants, even the expensive ones.

Worst case: The mandate is struck by itself. The insurers would be in a tough spot if the mandate — which brings insurance companies loads of new customers — is rejected, but the costly requirement to insure everyone remains. Insurers and policymakers from both parties warn this scenario would create a “death spiral” in which premiums would spike as customers buy insurance only when they really need it.

Justice Antonin Scalia

Best case: The individual mandate falls.

Going into oral arguments, some liberals and administration officials thought they might be able to win Scalia’s vote to uphold the law. After all, in 2005, the justice regarded as the intellectual leader of the court’s conservative wing sided with the federal government and the court’s liberal justices in a dispute over the feds’ authority to ban at-home cultivation of marijuana — even in states that have sought to legalize medicinal use of pot.

But it didn’t take long for Scalia to dash liberals’ hopes. He mounted a withering attack on the health care law, questioning whether the feds could mandate purchase of broccoli and lamenting the length of the 2,700-page bill.

A decision to strike the mandate, even one written by Chief Justice John Roberts, would cement Scalia’s position as the star of the conservative legal firmament.

Worst case: The mandate is upheld.

No doubt Scalia will have a colorful and impassioned dissenting opinion, but on the losing side he’s far easier to dismiss as a crank.

He’s already been on a tear this week, delivering an angry dissent in the Arizona immigration case that led one commentator to say he sounded like “a right-wing talk radio host rather than a justice of the Supreme Court.”

Dylan Byers, Reid Epstein, Jennifer Haberkorn, Kate Nocera, Manu Raju and Jake Sherman contributed to this report.