King v. Burwell—the challenge to the Affordable Care Act that the Supreme Court will hear on March 4th—is about more than health care. Court watchers have finally begun to realize that the case is also all about states’ rights. And while the challengers have tried to submerge this issue—because it dramatically undermines their case—its centrality to King has become undeniable.

The issue in King is whether the ACA penalizes states that opt out of setting up their own health insurance exchanges and, instead, let the federal government do it for them. The challengers have seized on four words in this 2,000-page law that, they contend, contain a dramatic consequence for the 34 states that have made this choice and allowed the federal government to step in: the loss of critical insurance subsidies that make health insurance affordable and sustain the insurance markets under the law. Without the subsidies—which are estimated at $25 billion across the 34 states—more than eight million Americans will likely lose their insurance. And, as a result, the insurance markets in those states will face near-certain collapse. The government argues that the statute contains no such penalty.

The challengers maintain that the case is simply about reading plain language. (I have detailed elsewhere why their hyper-literal reading of four words out of context is anything but plain and is not how the Supreme Court usually reads statutes.) But King is about a lot more than this. The case is about federalism—the role of states in our national democracy. The reason the challengers don’t want anyone to realize that is because the very text-oriented justices to whom they are appealing are the exact same justices who have consistently interpreted federal laws to protect states’ rights. And the challengers would read the ACA in the opposite way—as having devastating implications for the states.

The challengers’ interpretation turns Congress’s entire philosophy of states’ rights in the ACA upside down. Congress designed the exchanges to be state-deferential—to give the states a choice. But under the state-penalizing reading that challengers urge, the ACA—a statute that uses the phrase “state flexibility” five times—would be the most draconian modern statute ever enacted by the U.S. Congress that included a role for the states. What’s more, if interpreted as the challengers hope, the ACA would have been debated, enacted and implemented for two whole years under intense public scrutiny, including the scrutiny trained on it during the last major constitutional challenge in the Supreme Court in 2012, without anyone—no state, congressman or blogger—noticing these consequences or objecting to them.

A brief filed by Virginia and more than 20 other states attests that any clue of the dramatic penalty the challengers have read into the statute was entirely lacking. In the end, King is about whether an invented narrative that only emerged for purposes of this case should be permitted to work the greatest bait and switch on state governments in history.

Yes, protection of states’ rights is most often associated with the conservative movement. But it shouldn’t matter that the Court’s federalism rules support the government this time around. If these states’ rights rules are real and objective rules of law, they should apply regardless of whose side they happen to serve.

The Supreme Court, led by its conservatives, has spent the past four decades developing a set of legal rules to protect states from federal imposition. Those rules require Congress to provide unmistakably clear notice in the text of a statute before the Court will read a statute to intrude on the states. As read by the challengers, the ACA would completely violate these Court doctrines.

In fact, these very same state-protective rules were used by those who challenged the ACA in 2012—as well as by seven Justices in that case when they concluded the ACA’s Medicaid expansion was impermissibly coercive on the states. It is thus remarkable that the King challengers—formerly staunch federalists—have suddenly adopted an interpretation of the law diametrically at odds with these protections. They do not mention these flagship cases in their briefs, even though the consequences that their reading would impose on the states are far more intrusive—and come with no explicit warning in the statute—than those at issue in Medicaid expansion.

The problem again is hyper-simplification and obfuscation. Just as the challengers urge an over-simplistic reading of the statutory text, they have dramatically oversimplified how Congress approaches the states in the statute, masking the state-deferential way in which the ACA actually addresses the insurance exchanges. They argue that Congress is interested only in bullying the states when it comes to enlisting their cooperation and that the whole ACA adopts the same structure as the Medicaid expansion, which was a “use it or lose it” grant to the states. Not only would such a characterization of how Congress legislates with respect to the states be destructive to federalism in the long run (not to mention raise potential constitutional problems), it is simply wrong.

Long before King, the Court and scholars alike had recognized that Congress has a deep toolbox of varied statutory structures that it uses when it writes statutes with state roles. There are two primary models. One is the Medicaid model, a grant to the states that the states may accept or decline. If the states decline the money, that’s it, they simply lose the funds. As the amicus brief I co-authored in this case details, all of the programs using this model operate in the same way, and provide explicit notice to states of the consequences of declining the federal grant. What’s more, the fact that Congress was so explicit in the ACA itself about the consequences to the states of rejecting the Medicaid expansion shows us that Congress knew how to be clear in that statute about consequences to the states when it intended them.

But the Medicaid model is a red herring here because the Exchanges have an entirely different federalism structure. They adopt the other main federalism model that Congress routinely employs—one that looks like the Clean Air Act, not like Medicaid. Under this model, Congress enacts a nationwide program, but offers the states the right of first refusal to implement a part of it. All of these types of programs share a defining structural feature: a federal fallback mechanism that requires the federal government to operate the program when the states decline to do so. Either way, the new federal regulatory scheme takes full, national effect, and that’s the point of the program.

No one has ever disputed that the ACA’s central reform—the new insurance regulations—take effect nationwide regardless of whether states choose to run their own exchanges. The ACA gives the states the opportunity to run these insurance markets, but provides a federal fallback. There is no statute in the entire U.S. Code with a federal fallback that operates as challengers say this one does: The challengers argue that as soon as the states decline to run their own exchanges, the federal government steps in, the subsidies are no longer available, millions of people suffer, and the insurance markets collapse. Why in the world would Congress establish a national regulatory program, with a federal fallback, but doom the whole thing to destruction as soon as the federal fallback kicks in? When Congress wants a program to depend on the states’ adoption of it, it uses the Medicaid model. It doesn’t adopt the Clean Air Act model and doom it to ultimate failure.

Moreover, the very challengers in the 2012 constitutional case—who were co-counsel and co-plaintiffs with some of the same parties in King—recognized this difference between ACA’s Medicaid and Exchange provisions in their 2012 argument:

“The Act expressly renders enrollment in Medicaid a means of complying with the individual mandate, but provides no alternative mechanism through which the neediest of individuals might obtain insurance in a State that declined to participate in the newly expanded Medicaid program. The contrast with other components of the ACA is telling. For example, the ACA’s “health benefit exchange” provisions, which offer substantial new funding to States willing to implement such exchanges, expressly provide that the federal government will create and operate an exchange if a State declines the federal funding. ACA § 1321(c).” [Florida Brief 12-13]

The four conservative dissenting Justices in the 2012 opinion, Justices Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas and Alito, made the exact same comparison.

Finally, the King challengers fail to acknowledge that the ACA has a provision that expressly lays out the consequences to states of not operating their own exchanges—a provision that, unlike the buried tax provision directed to individuals on which challengers rely, couldn’t be more clearly signposted to give the requisite notice to the states. That provision is entitled “Failure to establish Exchange or implement requirements,” and it spells out what happens if states do not operate their own exchanges. The penalty the challengers would foist on the states—the loss of the subsidies and drastic consequences that would go with it—does not appear there, where it should appear if it existed.

Those who take the government’s side in this case will inevitably be called “fair weather federalists,” even though the state attorneys general and academics making these arguments to the Court espoused these same federalist principles long before the ACA existed. The real fair-weather federalists are those who have spent decades working to entrench these doctrinal protections for the states, who fought for them successfully in the 2012 case, and who now—in their zeal to destroy the ACA—are content to push those doctrines under the rug this time around. These King supporters are willing to let their contrived reading of the ACA set up what appears to be the greatest federalism trap for state governments in history. If the Court’s federalism doctrines stand for anything, they will not stand for this.