"The Supreme Court said Tuesday that it would consider a legal challenge to President Obama’s overhaul of the nation’s immigration rules."

"The court, which has twice rejected challenges to Mr. Obama’s health care law, will now determine the fate of one of his most far-reaching executive actions," the NYT reports.

Why did the Court take this one, United States v. Texas, No. 15-674?

In their written arguments before the court, the states acknowledged that the president has wide authority over immigration matters, telling the justices that “the executive does have enforcement discretion to forbear from removing aliens on an individual basis.” Their quarrel, they said, was with what they called a blanket grant of “lawful presence” to millions of immigrants, entitling them to various benefits.

In response, Solicitor General Donald B. Verrilli Jr. told the justices that “lawful presence” is merely what has always followed from the executive branch’s decision not to deport someone for a given period of time. He added that the consequences of allowing immigrants to be lawfully present were positive. “Without work authorization,” Mr. Verrilli wrote of the people eligible for the program, “they are more likely to work for employers who will hire them illegally, often at below-market wages, thereby hurting American workers and giving unscrupulous employers an unfair advantage.”

Much of the briefing so far has been focused on the threshold question of whether the states have suffered the sort of direct and concrete injury that gives them standing to sue....

There is special reason to think the states have standing, after what the Court did in Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, allowing the state to challenge the EPA's idea that the Clean Air Act didn't refer to greenhouse gases, back in the days when the Bush administration wasn't doing enough about global warming to suit the political party in power in Massachusetts. The tables are turned now, but the standing doctrine precedents are what they are. Fortunately for Obama, Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency is a murky mess of a case.

United States v. Texas coming up for oral argument and decision will add some interesting dimension to the issue of immigration and presidential power in this election year.

ADDED: Just a snippet from Chief Justice Roberts's dissenting opinion in Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency to give you a sense of how the majority muddled standing doctrine where a state is a plaintiff challenging the work of the executive branch:

[The majority] asserts that “States are not normal litigants for the purposes of invoking federal jurisdiction,” and that given “Massachusetts’ stake in protecting its quasi-sovereign interests, the Commonwealth is entitled to special solicitude in our standing analysis.”...

Relaxing Article III standing requirements because asserted injuries are pressed by a State, however, has no basis in our jurisprudence, and support for any such “special solicitude” is conspicuously absent from the Court’s opinion. The general judicial review provision cited by the Court, 42 U. S. C. §7607(b)(1), affords States no special rights or status. The Court states that “Congress has ordered EPA to protect Massachusetts (among others)” through the statutory provision at issue, §7521(a)(1), and that “Congress has . . . recognized a concomitant procedural right to challenge the rejection of its rulemaking petition as arbitrary and capricious.” The reader might think from this unfortunate phrasing that Congress said something about the rights of States in this particular provision of the statute. Congress knows how to do that when it wants to, see, e.g., §7426(b) (affording States the right to petition EPA to directly regulate certain sources of pollution), but it has done nothing of the sort here. Under the law on which petitioners rely, Congress treated public and private litigants exactly the same.

Nor does the case law cited by the Court provide any support for the notion that Article III somehow implicitly treats public and private litigants differently. The Court has to go back a full century in an attempt to justify its novel standing rule, but even there it comes up short. The Court’s analysis hinges on Georgia v. Tennessee Copper Co., 206 U. S. 230 (1907) —a case that did indeed draw a distinction between a State and private litigants, but solely with respect to available remedies. The case had nothing to do with Article III standing....

The Court asserts that Massachusetts is entitled to “special solicitude” due to its “quasi-sovereign interests,” but then applies our Article III standing test to the asserted injury of the State’s loss of coastal property....

It is not at all clear how the Court’s “special solicitude” for Massachusetts plays out in the standing analysis, except as an implicit concession that petitioners cannot establish standing on traditional terms. But the status of Massachusetts as a State cannot compensate for petitioners’ failure to demonstrate injury in fact, causation, and redressability....

ALSO: There seems to be a good chance of a majority vote composed of completely inconsistent positions — the 4 liberals saying there is standing and upholding what Obama did and at least one more vote — maybe 4 more votes — saying there is no standing and not reaching the merits. Justice Kennedy was in the majority in Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, so maybe he'll be the only dissenter, finding standing and then disagreeing on the merits. But why grant cert. if that's where they are going? To narrow standing doctrine? Or... here's what makes sense: There could be a 5-person vote for standing, consisting of the same 5 in Massachusetts v. EPA, so the merits will be reached. Then Kennedy votes with the Massachusetts v. EPA dissenters on the question of presidential power and Obama loses.