The response that the Texas attorney general, Ken Paxton, filed is almost laughable in its effort to bury the implications of the state’s position. “This narrow, fact-bound dispute” doesn’t merit the court’s attention, the attorney general wrote, observing that “the Fifth Circuit’s injunction implicates one four-mile stretch of the 1,951 miles of the U.S.-Mexico border.” That’s like claiming that the case the Supreme Court will hear this coming week on whether Section 3 of the 14th Amendment disqualifies Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy is unimportant because the dispute is over his eligibility for the Republican primary in only one of the 50 states.

“Defendants admit that they destroy property that does not belong to them,” the state whines in its brief. “Texas holds a proprietary interest in its fencing.” No doubt it does, but the question is whether Texas had the right to place its razor wire in a way that obstructs federal agents who have every right, indeed a duty, to be there. A federal law dating to 1952 gives the federal government essentially free rein in a zone that extends 25 miles inland from all the country’s borders.

In any event, this case is no more about a fence than the potential landmark administrative law case that was argued in January was about the fishing boat owners in whose name that case was brought. That case, along with a similar one, concern what’s known as the Chevron doctrine and could upend federal regulations on matters ranging from health care to the environment.

The point is, cases are always about issues, not about tangible objects nor, with rare exceptions, about individuals. The justices know this. Justice Sonia Sotomayor said as much in recent remarks at the law school at the University of California, Berkeley. “By the time you come to the Supreme Court, it’s not about your client anymore,” she said. “It’s not about their case. It’s about how that legal issue will affect the development of law.”

So what is this case, Department of Homeland Security v. Texas, really about? It’s the playing out of the declaration of war in an audacious letter that Governor Abbott sent to President Biden more than a year ago, in November 2022. Addressing the president as something less than a peer head of state, the Texas governor accused him of a “sustained dereliction of duty” in not adequately enforcing federal immigration law. Consequently, Governor Abbott continued, Texas was forced to invoke the U.S. Constitution’s Article I, Section 3, Clause 10, which provides that no state shall “engage in war, unless actually invaded, or in such imminent danger as will not admit of delay.”