A three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals has ruled that the stay on President Obama's amnesty program will be allowed to continue – that is, Obama's issuance of work permits to illegal aliens will continue to be frozen.

A federal appeals court on Tuesday refused to allow one of President Obama’s signature immigration proposals to move forward, throwing into doubt whether the program will even begin before the president leaves office.

In a split 2-to-1 decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit in New Orleans denied the Obama administration’s emergency request to lift a lower court’s injunction on a new initiative to defer the deportations of illegal immigrants and grant them work permits.

But Texas and 25 other states sued the administration, calling the move unconstitutional, and U.S. District Judge Andrew Hanen in Brownsville, Tex.,ruled in February that the launch of the expanded program should be put on hold until the case is resolved.

The 5th Circuit panel rejected that argument Tuesday. In a 68-page ruling, Judge Jerry Smith stated that Hanen’s injunction will remain in place because the administration is “unlikely to succeed on the merits of its appeal.”

Even if you're not an attorney (like me), you probably can't help but wonder what will happen next.  The administration could wait for the trial to resolve itself at the District Court level, but that will take time.  Or Obama might try to get the entire 5^th Circuit to lift the stay en banc, or might even try to appeal to the Supreme Court to do the same, although the Supreme Court is unlikely to get involved in such an issue until lower courts have ruled.

The question, then, is how might the entire 5^th Circuit or the Supreme Court rule on lifting the stay, or on the merits of the case?

There are 23 judges on the 5^th Circuit.  While Obama has been appointing judges left and right (but mostly left), he hasn't managed to fully pollute the 5^th Circuit with leftists.  Only eight judges on the court have been appointed by Democrats.  Of the other 15, seven were appointed by Ronald Reagan and are presumably reliable, four were appointed by George W. Bush and three by George H.W. Bush and may be reliable, and one was appointed by Gerald Ford and is probably very unreliable.  So there is no certainty, but it seems likely that the 5^th Circuit will be less sympathetic to Obama.

What about the Supreme Court?  In Arizona v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled, more or less, that the state of Arizona could not enforce federal immigrant law against illegal aliens.  Justices Kennedy and Roberts joined with the liberal justices to decide this.  Now of course, this is not the same situation, exactly; this case doesn't involve states' rights as much as it does the concept of executive overreach, of the executive exercising powers it doesn't have.  But as we saw in the Obamacare case, the majority of the Court has given a deferential view of executive powers, which may indicate that they will do the same here.

So I would say, on balance, that the Supreme Court is more likely than not to uphold Obama's amnesty, based on its past performance.  But that's going to take time, and by the time it winds up in the Supreme Court, it may be at the end of Obama's tenure, or even after.

But also keep in mind that Obama has already ignored the court's order to stop issuing work permits once and may keep doing so, flouting the courts as he has flouted the Congress and the Constitution.

This article was produced by NewsMachete.com, the conservative news site.