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I hate Obamacare so much that it’s possible I’ve written more words criticizing it over the past decade than any person alive. I have supported multiple previous legal efforts against the legislation and its implementation. In the fall of 2012, after the Supreme Court upheld Obamacare, my Halloween costume depicted John Roberts turning into a chicken. If Congress repealed all of Obamacare tomorrow, I’d throw a party. Despite my policy preferences, I’d say the latest decision from U.S. District Court Judge Reed O’Connor of Texas declaring Obamacare unconstitutional is an assault on the rule of law.

For those still unfamiliar, the current case, Texas v. Azar, has been filed by 20 Republican states. They argue that because the individual mandate was upheld by the Supreme Court as a tax, when the Republican tax law reduced the penalties to zero, it removed the constitutional justification for the mandate. In his decision, O’Connor not only agreed with this, but further decided that the individual mandate cannot be severed from the rest of Obamacare, and concluded that as a result it must be struck down in its entirety.

The opinion, writes libertarian law professor Jonathan Adler, an intellectual architect of a major Supreme Court challenge to the implementation of Obamacare’s subsidies, “is, in many respects, the conservative equivalent of so-called #Resistance judicial opinions that have embraced questionable legal arguments deployed to subvert objectionable Trump Administration policies.”

So what’s so bad about the decision? Basically, there are three layers of problems. First, it’s questionable why the states would have standing to sue. Second, it’s difficult to see why Congress eliminating the penalties would make it unconstitutional. Thirdly, even if one and two were established, it’s impossible to see how the mandate can be seen as inseparable from Obamacare after Congress just acted to separate it.

Let’s start with standing. In court, whatever the potential merits of a case, plaintiffs have to first establish that they have standing to sue, which requires them to show that they are injured by the action that is being challenged. In this case, there is no penalty for going uninsured, so what’s the injury? To get around this, O’Connor treats the mandate as a requirement separate from the enforcement mechanism of the penalty. He cautions against “assuming the individual plaintiffs need not comply with the individual mandate.” But there’s no assuming about it.

In fact, as I noted when the suit was brought back in February, in Roberts’ decision in NFIB v. Sebelius, he determined that somebody who went uninsured but paid the penalty would be fully compliant. “While the individual mandate clearly aims to induce the purchase of health insurance, it need not be read to declare that failing to do so is unlawful,” the chief justice wrote. “Neither the act nor any other law attaches negative legal consequences to not buying health insurance, beyond requiring a payment to the IRS. The government agrees with that reading, confirming that if someone chooses to pay rather than obtain health insurance, they have fully complied with the law.”

Whatever objections I may have had about Roberts’ ruling at the time, the reality is that as a lower court judge, O’Connor is bound by what the Supreme Court has decided at the time. And at no point does O’Connor grapple with the fact that the Supreme Court clearly said that without the tax, there’s no legal consequence to going uninsured.

Moving beyond standing, this fact also makes it challenging to see why eliminating the tax would thus make the mandate unconstitutional. Over the years, there have been debates about whether a significant enough increase in the mandate tax could make it unconstitutional. If, for instance, the tax were set so high that it cost the same to pay the tax as to purchase health insurance, it could be seen as effectively a legal requirement with no realistic option of avoiding it. That could warrant a revisiting of the Roberts ruling. But in this case, Congress has done the opposite. It has weakened the power of the mandate to the point where it has absolutely no teeth. If the Supreme Court said that the mandate with a tax penalty was lawful, it’s hard to see how a significantly weaker mandate would not be allowed to stand.

Once O’Connor is finished side-stepping the major arguments against his findings on standing and the constitutionality of the mandate, he then moves on to his most preposterous decision: that if the mandate is unconstitutional, the rest of the act must also fall because it is inseverable.

The severability analysis in part has become a debate over whether it’s relevant to consider the actions of Congress in 2010, which passed Obamacare, or the one 2017, which repealed the mandate penalties. If looking at 2017, it’s hard to argue that the mandate cannot be severed from the rest of the law. Congress did just that when it eliminated the penalties.

O’Connor concludes that in part because the 2017 tax law was passed through reconciliation and Congress was limited in what it could pass, looking at intent regarding severability is a “fool’s errand.” But this is ridiculous. Republicans knew they couldn’t easily repeal other Obamacare regulations in the tax bill through reconciliation, so they could have chosen not to touch the mandate penalties as a result, but they did.

Absurdly, O’Connor argues that “the 2017 Congress, like the 2010 Congress, intended to preserve the Individual Mandate because the 2017 Congress, like the 2010 Congress, knew that provision is essential to the [Affordable Care Act].” To start, it’s hilarious to categorize Republicans, who have fought the mandate for nearly a decade, as thinking the underlying individual mandate so important to preserve. Furthermore, the idea that if they thought it so important to preserve, that they would choose to preserve it only on paper, even while stripping it of any power, is crazy. This also doesn’t consider that Republicans were saying the exact opposite.

Here’s how Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell described things just before the Senate passed the tax legislation: “The conference report will also repeal the punitive individual mandate tax at the heart of Obamacare.” So here is the top Republican in the Senate literally saying: We want to repeal the penalties because we see them as so important to Obamacare. And yet O’Connor is arguing they wanted to preserve the mandate because they viewed it as essential.

As for taking the bizarre step of going back to intent in 2010, law professor Nicholas Bagley (a fair-minded supporter of Obamacare) points out that even though the 2010 Congress viewed the mandate as essential, “the mandate that the 2010 Congress said was essential had a penalty attached to it. The finding is irrelevant to a mandate that lacks any such penalty.”

More than anybody, I can appreciate the desire to get rid of Obamacare. But the Supreme Court has already made its decision, and thus lower courts are bound by the decision. As I have been arguing for years, including in a book on the subject, the way to go about things is for Republicans to unite around a sensible free-market alternative and repeal Obamacare legislatively. What’s happening here is an effort to short-circuit the normal process and implement policy preferences through judicial activism.

Embracing unelected judges using shoddy reasoning to impose their policy preferences on the country just when they produce outcomes conservatives agree with would do significant long-term damage to everything conservatives hold dear.