As Supreme Court Justice nominee Amy Coney Barrett participated in the second day of Senate hearings Tuesday - Democrats grilled her about whether she'd vote to overturn rulings on things like the Affordable Care Act.

"Conservatives ideologically and conservatives judicially are two different things," says YSU political science professor Dr. Paul Sracic, adding that the question with the ACA now revolves around 'severability' - whether the law remains despite part of it being struck down.
In this case - Congress struck down the individual mandate, not the law itself.

"So the Court would have to be going against what Congress has fairly explicitly said, and that's not something that conservative jurists like to do," said Sracic.

But the conversation about the healthcare law versus same-sex marriage or abortion rights might be different.
Dr. Sracic points to the power of precedence.

"What is the obligation of a judge or justice to follow a past decision? And nobody appearing before the Supreme Court is going to answer those kinds of questions because it would make them appear biased," Sracic says.

Which likely explains why Judge Barrett declined to say Roe v. Wade was a super-precedent - a case so established it can't be overturned.

"You certainly can't have justices every year changing their minds about the constitution," said Sracic. "Justices are very reluctant to overturn; I think what you're more likely to see is the chipping away of these sorts of things, sort of an alteration to them."