The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments next month in perhaps its highest-profile set of cases this term: whether the House Judiciary Committee and Manhattan’s district attorney can lawfully subpoena President Donald Trump’s financial records. The two cases, Trump v. Mazars and Trump v. Vance, could be a watershed moment for how the executive branch—and whosoever oversees it—defends itself against future scrutiny from congressional committees and state grand juries alike.

Some of the justices, however, may be looking for a way out. In its Monday batch of orders, the court asked the parties in both cases to file supplemental briefs “addressing whether the political question doctrine or related justiciability principles bear on the Court’s adjudication of these cases.” The request came without prompting from any of the litigants. It suggests that some of the justices might be willing to rule that the Supreme Court should let the dispute be resolved by the elected branches of government instead.

Such an outcome may bode poorly for Trump himself. House lawmakers and the Manhattan district attorney’s office subpoenaed records from multiple entities over which the president has no direct control, including Deutsche Bank, with which he has a long-standing financial relationship, and Mazars, which provides accounting services for the Trump Organization. They and other third parties may be willing to comply with subpoenas even without judicial intervention. At the same time, finding that congressional subpoenas are nonjusticiable would be a major long-term boon for future presidents who might chafe at oversight.

The bland-sounding political question doctrine cuts to the core of the federal judiciary’s power: whether it can hear (or not hear) certain cases. The Constitution outlines certain types of cases that the federal courts must (or must not) hear; it also gives Congress the power to define what categories of cases the courts can (or cannot) hear. When the Supreme Court invokes the political question doctrine, however, the court itself decides what types of cases it should (or should not) hear—or, in the court’s parlance, whether a matter is justiciable or nonjusticiable.

When invoked, the doctrine can have far-reaching consequences beyond the case at hand. In 1849, for instance, the Supreme Court refused to decide whether Rhode Island’s restrictive electoral franchise had run afoul of the Constitution’s Guarantee Clause, which requires the national government to ensure that each state maintains a “republican form of government.” That ruling gave Congress free rein, two decades later, to rebuild Southern state governments after the Civil War, though the high court later hamstrung Reconstruction’s potential in other ways.