The Supreme Court ruled Thursday that the Commerce Department has the authority to add a question to the 2020 census asking about the citizenship status of respondents, but it needs a better reason to do so. In a complex decision, the justices found the explanations provided by the Trump administration for adding the question—that it needed the information to protect voting rights—simply did not hold water. By this reading, the citizenship question is off the 2020 census… for now.

But the Court did not rule out that Commerce could eventually provide a believable rationale for their unprecedented addition—it will be up to lower courts to adjudicate their justifications. The issue now is a deadline, originally set by the administration, for printing the census forms. That was supposed to be at the end of this month. Whether the Commerce Department, faced with an unfavorable decision, will stick to its own timeline remains to be seen. (After the Court ruling, Trump tweeted that he asked lawyers to look into delaying the constitutionally mandated count altogether.)

If the current administration decides they have more time—and some have said printing could get pushed as late as October—the Supreme Court decision does not finally resolve the fate of the question. Trump officials could concoct a way to win the favor in the courts and seek an emergency ruling later this summer. With earlier decisions from the Roberts Court in Shelby County v. Holder and Citizens United v. FEC, it is hard to believe there couldn’t be a further battering of the safeguards of U.S. democracy. Permitting the politicization of the census will, in no uncertain terms, skew the next ten years of politics in Washington, D.C. and statehouses across the country—much in the same way GOP gerrymandering in the last redistricting cycle defined this past decade.

Right now, the findings of experts and lower courts hold sway over the claims of the Trump administration. The standard bearer of a political party hell-bent on restricting voting rights is not seriously hoping a citizenship question will help it strengthen the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA).

Indeed, as Federal District Court Judge Jesse Furman wrote earlier in the year, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who oversees the census, had “no apparent interest in promoting more robust enforcement of the VRA.” And, as reporter Ari Berman noted, the late GOP operative, Thomas Hofeller—who likely had a major role in the strategy behind the addition of the citizenship question—produced research which “concluded that [the citizenship question] would harm the minority groups that the VRA was designed to protect.”