Birthright citizenship predictions that will perhaps turn out to be completely wrong tomorrow: (1) The Court will strike down the executive order by a vote of 7-2 (Thomas and Alito dissenting). (2) But the Court will NOT impose constitutionally mandatory birthright citizenship on the country. Roberts and the moderate wing know that imposing constitutionally mandatory birthright citizenship would be extremely controversial. They read the amicus briefs on the national security implications of birth tourism from countries that hate us, and they get it. And they get that *we* get it, too. Preventing the country from doing something about such an obvious problem that half the country cares a ton about unless it can get a constitutional amendment, which they all know would be impossible, isn’t the hill that they want the Court’s legitimacy to die on. They’ll look for a way to avoid imposing that requirement. Thus: (3) Roberts will write a plurality opinion joined by Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett. He’ll point out that Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment gives Congress the power to enforce the rest of the Fourteenth Amendment and conclude that Section 5 therefore gives Congress the power to define “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” But Congress simply parroted the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” from the constitutional text back in the statutory text of the U.S. Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952. Roberts will call this a circular reference and include that by using the phrase from the constitutional text without expressly defining it when the constitutional text commits the power to define it to Congress, Congress was basically adopting the broad reading of the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” that (wrongly) prevailed for so many years. Congress could just as easily define that phrase more narrowly if it wanted to—so long as it doesn’t define it *too* narrowly—and if Congress wanted to, then it could certainly define it as narrowly as President Trump has in his executive order. After all, there’s plenty of history to support that view, as the dissent so helpfully points out, he’ll say. But Congress hasn’t done so yet, and since Chevron is no longer the law of the land, the executive order has to be struck down until Congress acts to adopt President Trump’s position. (4) But it’ll only be a plurality opinion because the three liberal justices will only concur in the judgment, writing separately in favor of constitutionally mandated birthright citizenship. Sotomayor or Kagan will write this opinion in an attempt to make this position look more sane than the nonsense that Jackson will write in a lone opinion joined by no one else on the Court. Sotomayor is perhaps more likely than Kagan to write this opinion because Kagan might be tempted to join the plurality opinion to make it a bare majority opinion with five votes and give it precedential weight even though it doesn’t go as far as she’d like. (This would be a smart move for her if she could live with half a loaf.) (5) Thomas and Alito will dissent on the grounds that everyone who’s being intellectually honest knows exactly what the phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” means because the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment actually told us, and common sense and prudence further weigh in favor of the common sense reading that President Trump’s executive order gives it. (6) President Trump will immediately call on Congress to pass a bill to codify his executive order, setting up a big, beautiful campaign issue for the fall, which is exactly what Roberts thought that he was setting up with his Obamacare decision. Come back tomorrow to see which Cracker Jack box I got my law license out of.