The day after the decision, 14 religious leaders sent a letter to President Obama asking for a new kind of religious exemption. Many religious charities provide various social services under contracts funded by the federal government. Obama had proposed rules banning government contractors from discriminating in employment against gays and lesbians. The singers wanted religious objectors to be free to continue policies of excluding them from employment. There was certainly language in the opinion to encourage those hopes. Could religious objections now override a civic commitment to equality?

That was Tuesday. On the Thursday after it left town, the Court issued an emergency order permitting a religious non-profit institution, Wheaton College, to reject for the time being the “accommodation” that the Hobby Lobby majority had hailed as the solution to religious objections to contraceptive coverage. In her Hobby Lobby dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg had pointed out language in the majority opinion suggesting that the majority was not serious about this accommodation; many read the emergency order as signaling the same thing. The order also revealed a bitterly divided Court. In a dissent for herself and the Court’s other two female members, Justice Sonia Sotomayor directly accused the majority of bad faith: “Those who are bound by our decisions usually believe they can take us at our word,” she wrote. “Not so today.”

Less than a week after it left town, the Court had found new fissures within itself; those fissures had spawned fissures within the country. As a result of Hobby Lobby, the nation would no longer simply be divided into red and blue states. Now, increasingly, Americans would work for red or blue companies.

In fact, it seemed, America now has red and blue justices on its highest court.

Hobby Lobby may have been about religious belief, but it was also very much about politics, about the bitterest divide between the parties. Hobby Lobby was a challenge to the Affordable Care Act. The ACA is Barack Obama’s signature achievement. It also represents the fondest wish of the Democratic Party. Democratic presidents since Harry Truman have sought to extend medical coverage to the nation as a whole. Republicans had bitterly fought this—even in the limited form of Medicare—as “socialism.”

In applying the Religious Freedom Restoration Act broadly to the ACA, the Hobby Lobby majority did just what it had done two years before in National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius. Without striking the ACA down, it weakened it, hollowed it out, and suggested that in some way it was less legitimate, less worthy of respect, than other laws. In 2012, the Court had let stand the “individual mandate,” but only as a tax, not (as most scholars had expected) as a regulation of commerce. At the same time, it had allowed the expansion of Medicaid but had empowered individual states to close their borders to federal health policy.