Twenty-eight words. That’s the full length of the 14th Amendment’s first sentence — the one that has generated more litigation, more legislation, and more political heat than almost anything else in the Constitution. Of those 28 words, five have been contested since 1866: “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”

The Supreme Court is poised to rule on their meaning in Trump v. Barbara, a case that will define who is an American citizen by birth. Whatever the court decides, the argument won’t end. It never does when the text is this compressed and the stakes are this high.