As a Black American who is old enough to remember the last days of legal Jim Crow racial segregation, I pay special attention whenever I hear signs that in many American minds the Civil War never really ended.

So does President Trump. That may help to explain why he took the extraordinary step of appearing in person in the grand chamber of the U.S. Supreme Court, apparently the first president to do so, as his solicitor general made the case against “birthright citizenship” before the high court justices.

The issue is whether a Trump may deny citizenship to babies born in the U.S. based on the legal immigration status of their parents. The policy, outlined in an executive order issued on his first day of his second term of office, seems to contradict the plain language of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution. Indeed, federal judges in four cases have ruled Trump’s order was unconstitutional, and now the Supreme Court is reviewing three of those rulings.

The outlook, I am happy to observe, does not look good for Trump’s side, which gave me a cautiously optimistic outlook about the side I favor — along with most other Americans, judging by the polls.

The Trump administration has settled on three main arguments: this right is abused by rich foreigners; the 14th Amendment only purported to speak to the legal status of enslaved people and their descendants at the end of the Civil War; and the policy is anomalous among the nations of the world.

As a PBS fact check pointed out, these objections don’t hold much water. The most convincing might be the notion that birthright citizenship is abused. Cases of “birth tourism” do occur, but they make up a small percentage of births and are easily addressed by less sweeping policy.