A majority of the justices of the Supreme Court on Wednesday seemed ready to reject the Trump administration’s attempt to strip up to 200,000 people a year of their constitutional right to birthright citizenship. They did so right in the face of Donald Trump, who became the first sitting president to attend an oral argument. He may not have enjoyed what he heard.

Previously, Trump had threatened to attend the hearing over the legality of his tariffs, and he apparently took the wrong message from losing that case last month. Instead, in Trump v. Barbara, the president throwing his weight around may have only reinforced some of the Court’s conservatives’ desire to show how independent they (sometimes rarely) are from him. The president sat in the front row of the public section — not, as one of his top Department of Justice flunkies suggested, in an imaginary special president’s chair — and left after his advocate, solicitor general John Sauer, took repeated rhetorical hits during his allotted time, only a few minutes into the counterargument from the ACLU’s legal director, Cecillia Wang.

The 14th Amendment to the Constitution, passed in the wake of the Civil War as part of Reconstruction, clearly states that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” For over a century, the Supreme Court has repeatedly upheld the understanding that people born in this country to noncitizen parents........

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