As the Supreme Court peppered attorneys with questions about the constitutionality of a key component of President Barack Obama's health care overhaul, observers Tuesday paid particular attention to the remarks of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy, commonly cast as the swing vote on the nine-member court as it weighs a decision expected in June.

Critics of the president's signature domestic achievement were encouraged by what they heard, though forecasting a high court decision on the basis of oral arguments is little more than a parlor game.

Tuesday saw the second of three remarkable days of public questioning of lawyers defending and opposing the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act's most contentious provision - the individual mandate - an unprecedented expansion of federal authority requiring all Americans obtain government-approved health insurance by 2014 or pay a penalty. Backers say Congress was within its constitutional powers to regulate interstate commerce when it crafted the mandate two years ago.

Justice Kennedy's questions and comments were some of the highlights of the day, particularly, as noted by Chapman University Law School professor Anthony Caso, when Kennedy said the individual mandate "changes the relationship of the federal government to the individual in the very fundamental way."

Caso said it was noteworthy when "Kennedy voiced the concern that perhaps health care is 'unique' and that, as argued by the government, is a sufficient limiting principle to uphold the exercise of federal power in this case."

Similar to what Caso observed, Tom Goldstein, a professor at Harvard and Stanford law schools and an attorney who has argued 24 cases before the Supreme Court, wrote at the SCOTUSblog that "Justice Kennedy's questions suggest that he believes that the mandate has profound implications for individual liberty: he asked multiple times whether the mandate fundamentally changes the relationship between the government and individuals."

Sally Pipes, president of the Pacific Research Institute and author of two books on Obamacare, predicted Justice Kennedy "will cast the deciding vote."

"He questioned what constitutional power the government had to force all Americans to buy health insurance. And he asked if Congress had exceeded its regulatory authority under the Commerce Clause."

Many legal scholars and observers believe Justice Kennedy and, perhaps, others on the court, will uphold the mandate if the government can demonstrate a "limiting principle" — basically, a limitation on the governmental powers advanced in the law, in this case, the individual mandate.

Justice Kennedy asked Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, arguing for the Obama administration, "Can you identify for us some limits on the Commerce Clause?"

Verrilli said, "Yes. The ... rationale purely under the Commerce Clause that we're advocating here would not justify forced purchases of commodities for the purpose of stimulating demand. (It) would not justify purchases of insurance for the purposes - in situations in which insurance doesn't serve as the method of payment for service."

Justice Kennedy replied, "But why not? If Congress - if Congress says that the interstate commerce is affected, isn't, according to your view, that the end of the analysis."

After listening to the arguments and the responses by the justices, Jeffrey Toobin, a senior legal analyst for CNN, concluded that Obamacare is in "grave danger."

Goldstein wrote that Justice Kennedy, after peppering the government with questions, "raised the possibility that the plaintiffs were right that the mandate was a unique effort to force people into commerce to subsidize health insurance but the insurance market may be unique enough to justify that unusual treatment."

"But he didn't overtly embrace that. It will be close. Very close."

The Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence, the Individual Rights Foundation, the Judicial Education Project, the Reason Foundation, the Heritage Foundation and other opponents filed a joint amicus brief that articulates why the mandate should fall:

"Congress has not only exceeded the limitations imposed by federalism, it has done so most cavalierly. In contrast to its more circumscribed approach to drafting prior landmark social legislation (e.g., the Social Security Act), Congress has failed to address the constitutionality of the individual mandate in any meaningful way. Where 'one or the other level of Government has tipped the scale too far,' and thus undermined "the federal balance of our constitutional structure,' it is left to this court to intervene and enforce the Constitution's structural protections."

Wednesday's final session was scheduled to debate whether the rest of the 2,700-page health care law can survive if the individual mandate is struck down.

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