The likelihood that the Court will grasp the nettle of the constitutional question immediately makes this one of this term’s blockbuster cases.

Whether Donald Trump and the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court like it or not, they’ll be seeing a lot of one another over the next four years. That is assured by Trump’s broadly ambitious plans to force a rethinking of many long-settled Washington-consensus practices around executive power, federal spending and employment, the administrative state, immigration, trade agreements, and the legal process. It’s also assured by his confrontational strategy with the courts, which tends to rapidly escalate district court lawsuits into petitions to the High Court’s docket. Today, the reckoning began with one of Trump’s most direct challenges to long-standing Supreme Court precedent: his effort to undo birthright citizenship.

Trump tried to strip birthright citizenship from millions of Americans by means of an executive order limiting automatic citizenship to children born to citizens or to lawful permanent residents (i.e., green card holders). As I’ve detailed here, here, and here, however, his legal position runs headlong into both the text of the 14th Amendment’s citizenship clause as originally understood when it was adopted in 1868 and the Supreme Court’s long-settled decision on the meaning of that clause in United States v. Wong Kim Ark (1898). There’s also the complicating factor that Congress codified the language of the citizenship clause after Wong Kim Ark, which at least requires the courts to consider whether the president can change the law in this area by executive order, without Congress, even if the Court thinks that Wong Kim Ark was wrongly decided or limits it to its factual setting. (The contrary argument would be that Congress, by tracking the citizenship clause’s language, simply intended to codify whatever is granted by the Constitution rather than cast in stone a particular judicial reading of its language.)

In any event, three separate district courts in Maryland, Massachusetts, and Seattle issued injunctions that prevented the Trump administration from taking even preliminary steps to implement the order, and after getting nowhere with the appeals courts, the administration filed three petitions to the Court asking it to either hear the case or at least limit the scope of the district court orders. In an order this afternoon, the Court consolidated three applications, deferred any action on the administration’s request for emergency relief, and set the case for oral argument on May 15.

It would make little sense for the Court to do it this way unless it intends to settle the constitutional question or, at minimum, rule that it can’t be challenged by executive order without a change in statute. Otherwise, why give a month to prepare for a full argument, after the Court’s argument calendar for the term is finished? The likelihood that the Court will grasp the nettle of the constitutional question immediately makes this one of this term’s blockbuster cases. The odds that the Court overrules Wong Kim Ark, however, seem to me not very high. Whatever the limits of birthright citizenship should be, the Court will be dealing only in what they are — and there’s a heavy weight of both precedent and originalist scholarship in favor of the status quo.