In her opinion, Justice Ginsburg addressed why “this court is not equipped to grant the relief Morales-Santana seeks.” She explained that the general rule set by Congress for conveying citizenship to foreign-born children when the parents are married subjects citizen fathers and mothers to the longer residency requirement. The shorter requirement for unwed citizen mothers is itself an exception to the general rule.

The question for the court, she continued, was what choice Congress would have made had it known that the exception was constitutionally vulnerable: Would it have extended the exception to unwed fathers, or would it have withheld it from the mothers? “Although extension of benefits is customary in federal benefit cases,” she wrote, “all indicators in this case point in the opposite direction. Put to the choice, Congress, we believe, would have abrogated [the] exception, preferring preservation of the general rule.”

Was this explanation persuasive? Not to me, actually, but then I wasn’t Justice Ginsburg’s primary audience. Her fellow justices were. When the case was argued last Nov. 9, it was clear that the court was going to struggle with the question of remedy if it found an equal protection violation. And the more than seven months that elapsed from argument to decision made it clear that a struggle was going on. By the time of the June 12 decision, the case was the oldest undecided case on the court’s calendar. (By contrast, two of the cases the court decided on Monday of this week were argued in late April.)

Justice Ginsburg is one of the fastest writers on the court, so obviously some heavy negotiating was going on during those seven months. Was leveling down the price she had to pay to hold a majority? Two justices, Clarence Thomas and Samuel A. Alito Jr., wrote separately that they agreed with the remedy, thus providing a unanimous 8-0 vote for the final judgment. (Justice Neil Gorsuch didn’t have a vote, since he joined the court after the case was argued.) The two justices added in their two-paragraph opinion that because “the court’s remedial holding resolves this case,” there was no need to have decided the constitutional issue.

The fact that Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. joined Justice Ginsburg’s opinion in full is intriguing. Finding an equal protection violation doesn’t come naturally to him. In fact, he almost certainly voted to uphold the mother-father distinction in Flores-Villar v. United States, the case that ended in a tie vote (and therefore without an opinion) six years ago. Assuming that Justices Stephen G. Breyer, Anthony M. Kennedy and Sonia Sotomayor joined Justice Ginsburg then in voting to strike down the distinction, Chief Justice Roberts must have voted with Justices Thomas, Alito and Antonin Scalia to uphold it. Something persuaded him to change his mind. Maybe the remedial judgment gave him sufficient comfort.

And what about Justice Ginsburg? Can we assume she’s happy with the outcome of the case, or do we suppose she wrote the remedial section with gritted teeth? Twenty-four years ago, in July 1993, she was President Bill Clinton’s first Supreme Court nominee, and I covered her Senate confirmation hearing. I had met Judge Ginsburg several times, but didn’t know her well. I found her Judiciary Committee testimony enlightening, and I wrote an analysis that appeared under the headline “A Sense of Judicial Limits.” I described her as “something of a rare creature in the modern judicial lexicon: a judicial restraint liberal.” By that I meant that while her own commitments were to liberal outcomes, she displayed an equally strong commitment to letting Congress take the lead. “In her view, equality — or any other goal — is best achieved if all branches of government have a stake in achieving it.”

So I’m ready to assume that if the remedial portion of her opinion last week was a compromise, it was one she offered willingly. Her “over to you, Congress” handoff may seem naïve in the present political climate, but it conforms with her deepest beliefs about the appropriate judicial role.

And it’s worth remembering that from her earliest years as a nervous young lawyer standing before the nine men of the Supreme Court, Ruth Ginsburg has always played a long game, with the ultimate goal, equality of the sexes, constantly in view. As this case turned out, the price for equality was high. But I don’t doubt that for Justice Ginsburg, it was a price worth paying for being able to strike a blow against still another law based on a generalization about the way “men and women are.”