In this column, Due Diligence, erstwhile attorney and GQ staff writer Jay Willis untangles the messy intersection of law, politics, and culture.

Two weeks ago, just before recessing for the summer, the Supreme Court decided that the Trump administration cannot add a question to the 2020 census about whether respondents are U.S. citizens—at least, not unless it comes up with a better reason for wanting to do so. This result comes as a setback for the president, but only a temporary one, because the opinion mapped out exactly what attorney general William Barr and his Department of Justice need to do in order to get their way. And on Monday, Barr took the first few steps down that path.

The Court arrived at its conclusion after determining that, as a matter of administrative law, the Trump officials had failed to offer a coherent justification for why they wanted to make the change. This is roughly the legal equivalent of chastising a student for turning in a math test without showing their work, and to Barr, it is a simple problem to fix. “I felt the Supreme Court decision was wrong, but it also made clear that the question was a perfectly legal question to ask, but the record had to be clarified,” he said, a day after the Department of Justice announced its intent to turn over the case to a new team of lawyers. He reiterated his belief that Trump "is right on the legal grounds," and that it "makes a lot of sense for the president to see if it’s possible that we could clarify the record in time to add the question” before the census begins.

Incorporating the citizenship query into the 2020 forms, according to the Census Bureau's experts, could by itself cause the response rate among households with non-citizens to decrease by five percent. Such a systemic undercount within immigrant communities would both deny them representation in Congress and shift federal resources away from the areas in which they live—which is the real reason the Trump administration wants to do it. This is not speculation; according to analyses conducted by the late Thomas Hofeller, a GOP strategist who lobbied White House officials to include the question, congressional apportionment based only on the population of U.S. citizens "would be advantageous to Republicans and Non-Hispanic Whites."

Wilbur Ross, whose Department of Commerce houses the Census Bureau, insisted throughout legal challenges to his decision that the government wanted to collect citizenship data for a legitimate, nondiscriminatory reason: in order better enforce the Voting Rights Act. But at trial, the evidence showed that behind the scenes, Ross came up with this voting-rights story only after quietly asking the Department of Justice to help cobble together a pretext. (Among the anti-immigrant officials who took part in back-channel discussions about the question's potential impact were then-attorney general Jeff Sessions, then-White House advisor Steve Bannon, and former Kansas secretary of state and current voter fraud conspiracy theorist Kris Kobach; at oral argument, Justice Sonia Sotomayor called the voting-rights explanation "a solution in search of a problem.") Sessions's Department of Justice was happy to oblige Ross, and Hofeller even helped it draft a formal request to the Department Commerce.

This, said chief justice John Roberts, is where the administration went awry: by offering a "contrived" justification for its choice. "If judicial review is to be more than an empty ritual, it must demand something better than the explanation offered for the action taken in this case," he wrote. He emphasized in his opinion that he had not determined the Bureau's decision to be "substantively invalid," but only that the Bureau had to offer a "reasoned explanation"—presumably, something other than disclosing the Trump administration's desire to scare immigrants into silence—for making it.