As the Supreme Court heard oral arguments today about birthright citizenship, Donald Trump was watching from the courtroom—an apparent first for a sitting president. He sat silently as the justices pelted skeptical questions at Solicitor General John Sauer, who tried to defend a Trump executive order purporting to deny citizenship to the U.S.-born children of certain immigrants. Not long into arguments by Cecillia Wang, the ACLU lawyer representing Trump’s challengers, the president got up and left.The odd scene reflected the administration’s approach to the matter of birthright citizenship: Simply declare you are right, and then ignore arguments to the contrary. Yet if Trump intended his presence to pressure the justices into siding with him, he failed. Most of the justices, even among the conservative supermajority, seemed inclined to strike down his policy. Still, the fact that this case got as far as it did—and that the justices had to consider it seriously enough to spend their time rebuking it—is itself a scandal.The case, Trump v. Barbara, turns on the Trump administration’s argument that the Fourteenth Amendment does not actually mean what its text states and what nearly everyone has agreed it says for more than 150 years. Ratified after the Civil War, the amendment establishes that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.” It repudiated the Supreme Court’s notorious 1857 ruling in Dred Scott, which barred Black people from citizenship and created a permanent underclass of people without access to the same rights offered to other Americans. In 1898, the Supreme Court established clearly in United States v. Wong Kim Ark that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections extended to babies born in the United States to parents of noncitizens.This egalitarian guarantee was, however, unsatisfactory to Trump. On the first day of his second term in office, he released an executive order attempting to restrict citizenship to children of parents who are either U.S. citizens or lawful permanent residents (that is, green-card holders). The fact that this flatly contradicted the Fourteenth Amendment seemed not to bother the new administration. The policy would have created an enormous administrative headache—maternity wards, after all, are not set up to establish the immigration status of expectant parents—but it was immediately halted by a wave of legal challenges.[Amanda L. Tyler: The Supreme Court has heard this one before]At first, some Supreme Court watchers were nervous when the justices agreed to take up the case. The Court had the option of simply refusing the government’s request to hear the matter. Meanwhile, contrarian legal academics had been busy cobbling together scholarship to support Trump’s claims about the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment. These arguments were so absurd, some scholars worried, that even the justices’ willingness to dignify them with a hearing might have indicated an inclination to be convinced.Today’s proceedings will come as a relief. The justices overwhelmingly appeared dismissive of Sauer’s legal arguments. Chief Justice John Roberts deemed Sauer’s reasoning “quirky” and “idiosyncratic.” Justice Neil Gorsuch accused the solicitor general of relying on obscure “Roman-law sources,” in a tone that sounded as if he were rebuking Sauer for leaving a moldy Tupperware in the fridge. Justice Amy Coney Barrett cut Sauer off mid-sentence, demanding, “Yeah, yeah, yeah—what about the Constitution?” The three liberals were similarly skeptical. Only Justice Samuel Alito and possibly Justice Clarence Thomas seemed open to potentially ruling for Trump.Sauer’s opening remarks did not mention Wong Kim Ark at all or ask the Court to overturn it.. His arguments—made with Trump sitting behind him—depended on quibbling with the intended scope of the Fourteenth Amendment, which, he maintained, was narrowly meant to correct the injustice of Dred Scott by granting citizenship to Black Americans. But as the Court recognized in Wong Kim Ark, the amendment’s framers intended to extend the grant of citizenship to everyone except a small number of people who were born on American soil and yet remained outside U.S. “jurisdiction”: the children of diplomats and invading forces, and—because of the unique circumstances of Native Americans—members of Native tribes. (Native Americans born in the U.S. are nevertheless citizens under a 1924 statute.)Sauer insisted that the loopholes in the amendment were wide enough to withhold citizenship from the children of immigrants. Meanwhile, Gorsuch, a strong supporter of Native sovereignty, seemed to grow more and more annoyed over the course of oral arguments with Sauer’s selective use of Indian law. (“Do you think Native Americans are birthright citizens under your test?” Gorsuch asked bluntly at one point, to which Sauer responded, uncertainly, “I—think so?”)[Greg Grandin: The revolutionary idea that remade the new world]The justices’ prickliness toward Sauer contrasted with their collegial reception of the ACLU’s Cecillia Wang. Herself a citizen born to immigrant parents, Wang had the easier argument by far: “I know you’ve got a lot of good stuff on your side,” Gorsuch told her at one point. She called Sauer’s decision not to ask the Court to simply overrule Wong Kim Ark a “fatal concession.” Near the end of arguments, Justice Brett Kavanaugh suggested that the Court could simply issue a “short opinion” in the ACLU’s favor reaffirming Wong Kim Ark. “Yes,” Wang said, simply. Laughter rippled through the courtroom.The Court’s apparent lack of interest in rolling back the Fourteenth Amendment bodes well for the durability of the Constitution, the integrity of the judiciary, and, not least of all, the lives of the many people who have depended and will depend on its offer of citizenship. Whatever the Court rules, though, Trump v. Barbara will be a black mark on administration lawyers and legal scholars who proved eager to reverse engineer flimsy arguments in support of an anti-constitutional aim, and on a political system that nearly enabled the gutting of one of America’s most foundational promises.