AT THE end of June, when the Supreme Court saved the Affordable Care Act from a technical challenge in King v Burwell,it seemed the legal battles over Obamacare were finally over. But the “never-ending saga” of anti-Obamacare litigation, as Justice Elena Kagan put it, presses on. On August 7th two federal appellate courts turned back separate challenges to Barack Obama’s signature health-care law. The rulings are more bad news for litigants who have approached the courts to try to undermine the law, but either or both cases could eventually be heard by the Supreme Court. The first challenge goes after the law’s individual mandate, the provision that requires most Americans to buy a health-insurance policy (subsidised by the feds, for lower-income people, in states that expanded Medicaid) in order to expand coverage while keeping insurance companies solvent. This part of the law was upheld in 2012 by a 5-4 vote, with Chief Justice John Roberts writing the opinion. This ruling, in National Federation of Independent Business v Sebelius, determined that the individual mandate, backed by a penalty for non-compliance, was within Congress’s power, under Article I of the constitution, to “lay and collect taxes”. Now the plaintiffs are taking a new tack, pointing to the so-called “origination clause”, one section back in that same article. The clause requires that “all bills for raising revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with amendments as on other bills.”

The trouble, the plaintiffs say, is that Obamacare was initiated in the Senate, not the House. So as a “bill for raising revenue”, the ACA was thus improperly enacted. The complaint comes from Matt Sissel, a hale and hearty artist from Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Mr Sissel says he has no use for health insurance and prefers to pay for occasional doctor visits out of pocket rather than be conscripted to buy a policy. Thirteen months ago, three judges on the circuit court for the District of Columbia held for the government. Obamacare was not designed as a revenue-raising bill, they ruled, but as a reform of America’s health-care system. The origination clause doesn’t apply. Undeterred, Mr Sissel sought an “en banc” review of this decision by all 11 judges at the DC circuit court. Last week, after a long delay, the court declined, by a 7-4 vote, to re-hear Mr Sissel’s case.

The four judges who would have granted en-banc review do indeed believe that any bill raising revenue needs to originate in the House; the seven who denied it maintain that the origination clause applies only to bills whose “primary purpose” is to bring money into the government’s coffers. Since the point of the ACA was “to overhaul the national healthcare system, not to raise revenue”, it did not run afoul of the constitution, they ruled. But in the end, this judicial tiff makes little practical difference. The full slate of appellate judges still concurred that Mr Sissel was barking up the wrong tree. The four dissenters say that they would have voted in favour of the ACA too, though on the theory that the bill did originate in the House after all.

Opponents of Obamacare’s so-called “contraceptive mandate” also got a thrashing last week. In a 42-page decision from the Second Circuit appellate court in New York, three judges rebuffed complaints from several Catholic non-profit organisations that the ACA forces them to violate their conscience by permitting their employees to receive free birth control.

Religious bodies like churches and synagogues have always been exempt from the mandate, and last year the Supreme Court ruled inBurwell v Hobby Lobby that some types of religious corporations can be released as well. Adding religiously affiliated non-profits to this list would deny birth-control coverage to tens of thousands of women who do not necessarily share their employers’ religious beliefs. So the Obama administration hatched a sympathetic compromise: organisations can sign a form or write a letter opting out of contraceptive coverage on religious grounds, which clears the way for a third-party insurer to provide birth control instead. The groups who have brought this complaint are still not satisfied, however, as they argue that the mere act of filling out the form or writing the letter still implicates them in the sordid business of contraception and curtails their religious liberty.

No way, the Second Circuit held. Echoing recent rulings from six other circuit courts, Judge Rosemary Pooler wrote that the accommodation does not impose a “substantial burden” on the plaintiffs’ religious freedom in violation of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. To the contrary,” it “relieves” them of this burden. Just because a plaintiff “considers a regulatory burden substantial does not make it a substantial burden,” the court held. “Were it otherwise, no burden would be insubstantial.”

Lawyers for Mr Sissel have already indicated they will ask the Supreme Court to review their case; the Catholic organisations are mulling their options. Will the Supreme Court agree to step in to resolve either of these fights? Not likely. But then again, few expected the court to hear the frivolous semantic complaint known as King v Burwell last year. If four of the nine justices think either complaint against Obamacare has merit, we may see the ACA back on the Supremes' docket when they return to work in October.