REPUBLICANS said they scored an important victory against Obamacare on Tuesday, when voters in Missouri roundly rejected the president’s health-care law. Really? Missouri’s referendum, the first of its kind this year, aims to keep the state’s citizens from being required to buy health insurance. But it will have little practical impact. The health-care requirement will not take effect until 2014. By that time, the courts will likely have had a say on the matter.

Fine, say the proposition’s supporters. Even if the referendum itself will do little, the vote was of huge symbolic importance. It was a cry from the heartland (from a presidential bellwether state), they declared, a sign of growing voter discontent. I’m not entirely convinced of that either. Missouri’s Republican primaries were particularly competitive this year; more voters cast Republican ballots than Democratic ones. How well the electorate on Tuesday represented the state as a whole is questionable.

Missouri’s vote against health-care reform, which will be followed by others in Arizona and Oklahoma, will no doubt continue to be trumpeted by Republicans. But a far more important attack on the reform came on Monday, when a federal judge allowed Virginia’s suit against the law to proceed. Nearly two dozen states are challenging the law in court, but Virginia’s is the first to inch forward. “While this case raises a host of complex constitutional issues,” wrote Henry Hudson for Virginia’s Eastern District, “all seem to distill to the single question of whether or not Congress has the power to regulate—and tax—a citizen’s decision not to participate in interstate commerce.” Missouri may add to the political furour. The real debate will take place in court.