That dynamic already has some Republicans on Capitol Hill dreading a favorable ruling from the Supreme Court, leading to Alice-in-Wonderland headlines like this one from The Hill: “Republicans Fear They Will Win ObamaCare Court Battle.” In more than five years since the Affordable Care Act was enacted, the GOP has been unable to coalesce around an alternative, although senior lawmakers have promised to respond quickly if the justices strike down the subsidies.

Candidates face a difficult set of choices. Should Congress restore the subsidies as President Obama will undoubtedly demand? Either restore the subsidies temporarily or provide similar government assistance as part of an off-ramp from Obamacare? Or stand by and do nothing to repair or sustain a law that Republicans have spent years trying to destroy?

To no one’s surprise, Ted Cruz has already staked out that final position. The Texas Tea Partier and presidential aspirant told Politico earlier this month he’d fight any plan by congressional Republicans to extend the subsidies into 2017, when they hope a new GOP president could replace the law entirely. RedState’s Erick Erickson is similarly urging candidates to use a Supreme Court ruling against the subsidies as an impetus to double down on the repeal message. In a post on Wednesday, he said Republicans should run ads in all 50 states blaming the debacle on the Democrats who wrote the Affordable Care Act: “They never read it, they rushed it through, and now you’re paying the price. Tell Barack Obama we need to repeal Obamacare and start over.”

Marco Rubio, a Cruz rival and Senate colleague, has endorsed the middle option, which is being hashed out in Congress by Representative Paul Ryan and others. Writing on his campaign website, Rubio said that while the ultimate goal must be to repeal and replace the entire healthcare law, “we must also recognize the reality that the ruling would leave millions without health insurance.” Without specifics, he called for providing “an off-ramp for our people to escape this law without losing their insurance.” Other leading hopefuls have been similarly vague. Scott Walker, the Wisconsin governor, has said if the Court throws out the subsidies, Congress “should fix it.” But he said nothing about how. Jeb Bush has said even less on the topic, and his aides declined an opportunity to outline his views.

For Hillary Clinton, a ruling against Obamacare would be a disastrous policy outcome, but it would give her an easy campaign message that would put her on the same page as the president: Congress should simply pass a one-sentence bill clarifying that the federal subsidies are available to anyone, not merely participants in state-run exchanges. Yet Neera Tanden, an informal Clinton adviser who is president of the Center for American Progress, predicted that Democrats would respond to an adverse Supreme Court decision with a much broader critique over the next year-and-a-half. “You would see really two strands of response,” she told me. “One is on the Affordable Care Act itself, and the other is on the role of the courts.”