The US Supreme Court on Thursday dismissed a lawsuit that sought to strike down the Affordable Care Act (ACA), rebuking a number of Republican-led states that want to see the law invalidated.

The case, California v. Texas, was seen by many court observers as a sequel to the 2012 suit National Federation of Independent Business v. Sebelius. That lawsuit involved a challenge to the individual mandate, the part of the law that requires individuals to purchase health insurance or face a penalty. In that case, the court held that the individual mandate was constitutional because it ruled the penalty was a tax. However, in 2017 Congress changed the law, lowering the tax penalty from $695 to $0.

This change led to the new lawsuit, which involved two individual plaintiffs and a group of states led by Texas. They argued that with the individual mandate penalty set to zero, the law’s provision requiring minimum essential insurance coverage was rendered unconstitutional because neither the Commerce Clause nor the Tax Clause in the Constitution gives Congress the power to enact it. They further argued that the coverage requirement was not severable from the rest of the law, thus rendering the whole of the ACA unconstitutional.

Justice Stephen Breyer wrote the majority opinion, joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, Clarence Thomas, Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett. The opinion held that neither the states nor the individual plaintiffs have standing to bring the suit in the first place. With regard to the former, the states argued that they are harmed because their citizens, in order to comply with the mandate, enroll in state-sponsored programs such as Medicaid, which cost the states money. However, Breyer wrote, there was no link between the mandate, which is unenforceable, and citizens’ decisions to enroll.

The individual plaintiffs’ argument was similar. They alleged they were harmed because they had to pay money each month for health insurance coverage, which they did not want, in order to comply with the mandate. The court, however, held that while the ACA “tells them to obtain that coverage, has no means of enforcement. With the penalty zeroed out, the IRS can no longer seek a penalty from those who fail to comply.” Because the penalty cannot be enforced against them, they have suffered no harm, and therefore lack standing to sue.

Justice Samuel Alito wrote a dissent, joined by Justice Neil Gorsuch, in which he argued that the states did in fact have standing because, in his view, they have suffered a tangible financial injury that could be remedied by a favorable decision by the court. He would have held the mandate unconstitutional in its current form, and because the costs the states bear for Medicaid and other programs are “inextricably linked to the individual mandate,” the states “are not obligated to comply with the ACA provisions that burden them.”

Thomas wrote a concurring opinion in which he pushed back against Alito’s dissent. While he agreed with Alito’s characterization that the court has “rescued” the ACA twice previously, Thomas agreed with the majority’s view that none of the plaintiffs has suffered any sort of injury that would grant them standing to sue. He also rejected Alito’s argument that the costs imposed on the states by other provisions of the ACA are inseverable from the individual mandate; the states did not make this argument in the lower courts, nor did those courts “address it in any detail.”