A federal judge’s ruling last week striking down the Affordable Care Act has evoked a nearly uniform response. The decision, everyone notes, is “bananas,” “crazypants,” and unlikely to hold up on appeal in higher courts. Even the ACA-disliking Wall Street Journal editorial board slammed its reasoning; others have called it “lawless,” a “cruel mistake,” and “absurd.”

They aren’t wrong: the argument they’re skewering contends that by eliminating the financial penalty for not having health insurance coverage, the individual mandate went from being an exercise of taxing power to an exercise of illegal government coercion (even though the only conceivably coercive element to begin with was the tax penalty). According to Judge Reed O’Connor of North Texas, the individual mandate was also not severable from the rest of the health care law — and so when Congress removed the penalty in a bill last year, the body signaled its intent to repeal Obamacare entirely. The idea that Congress could not have possibly intended to leave the rest of the ACA intact while axing one element is contradicted by the fact that that’s exactly what they did.

Of course it’s an idiotic argument. But this wasn’t a failure of logic; it was a triumph of antidemocratic power wielded by capital’s handmaidens. Legal decisions are not produced by neutral algorithms that yield objective judgments based on formal logic. They’re written by people making ideological arguments, in support of ideological outcomes.