Last month, with a trial date approaching for the New York lawsuit, the administration went to the Supreme Court with a request to block the plaintiffs from taking pretrial testimony from Secretary Ross and John Gore, the acting assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. Federal District Judge Jesse Furman, presiding over the case, had refused to block the depositions on the ground that the plaintiffs had already made a sufficiently “strong showing of bad faith” on the part of the two officials to justify further investigation of the decision-making process. The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit upheld Judge Furman’s order.

In the administration’s request to the Supreme Court, Solicitor General Noel J. Francisco argued that because “an agency decision maker’s mental processes are generally irrelevant to evaluating the legality of agency action,” there was no reason to “probe the secretary’s mental processes.” In an unsigned order, the justices agreed, apparently unanimously, to block the deposition of Secretary Ross, while voting 7 to 2 to allow the deposition of Mr. Gore to go forward. The dissenters were Justices Neil Gorsuch and Clarence Thomas, who said the court should have stopped the questioning of both men. Their separate opinion contained a strong hint to Judge Furman: “One would expect that the court’s order today would prompt the district court to postpone the schedule d trial and await further guidance.”

That was a hint that Judge Furman chose not to take a few days later, when the administration asked him to stay the entire trial. Rejecting that request, the judge elaborated on his earlier reference to “bad faith.” In a pointed 15-page opinion, he wrote that he had “found reason to believe that Secretary Ross had provided false explanations of his reasons for, and the genesis of, the citizenship question.” Three days later, the administration was back at the Supreme Court, quoting from the two justices’ earlier dissenting opinion and seeking an immediate stay of the trial. In an unsigned one-sentence order, issued last Friday, the justices refused. The vote this time was 6 to 3. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. joined Justices Gorsuch and Thomas. The trial began in Judge Furman’s courtroom in Manhattan on Monday.

It takes the votes of five justices to grant any kind of stay. Conspicuously missing from the votes on the administration’s side were Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. and his newest colleague, Justice Brett Kavanaugh. The majority’s silence gives no hint of their reasoning. Maybe the chief justice and Justice Kavanaugh simply found Solicitor General Francisco’s hyperbolic rhetoric unpersuasive. Or maybe it was something deeper, a sense that a 5-to-4 vote to shield the Trump administration from ordinary legal process would have been a needless step on the road to disaster for a court already seen as polarized by political allegiances. By just such incremental developments will the line between comedy and tragedy be etched by the newly constituted Roberts court.

But for those of us hanging on the court’s every move, there was hardly time to catch our breath before the Trump administration was back at it again, trying to bend the court to its will. On Monday night, it filed three highly unusual petitions at the court, this time seeking immediate review of decisions by three Federal District Courts that have prevented the administration from shutting down the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. All three decisions, from courts in New York, San Francisco and Washington, are already in federal appeals courts, with one appeal having been argued and another scheduled to be heard in January. So what’s the rush?