JOHN ROBERTS, the chief justice, frequently warns against the perceived politicisation of the courts. In April he said there is a “real danger” that the public will misconstrue “partisan hostility” surrounding Congress and the White House as influencing “nonpartisan activity of the judicial branch”. So when a political hot potato arrives on the chief justice’s doorstep, we should expect him to do all he can to cool it down. That is no mean task when it comes to Donald Trump’s executive order banning travel from six Muslim-majority countries. The legal and political battle over the president’s travel restrictions—beginning with his ill-fated order on January 27th and continuing with the revised policy on March 6th—has raged for five months. When the nation’s highest court waded into the controversy on June 26th, it appeared to give the Trump administration a rather thorough win. In fact, the endorsement of the president’s travel policy is partial and temporary, and the anodyne, unsigned 13-page order may be all the Supreme Court ever has to say about it.

The “per curiam” (by the court) missive did two things. First, it noted that the justices have agreed to hear Trump v State of Hawaii and Trump v International Refugee Assistance Project (IRAP) in a consolidated oral argument “during the first session of October Term 2017”, which begins on October 2nd. Ordinarily, the Supreme Court does not commit to a hearing timeframe when it grants a case; it was responding to Mr Trump’s request for expedited review. Second, the order partially lifted injunctions lower federal courts had imposed on Mr Trump’s executive order. Until the justices have a chance to fully vet it, the travel ban may go into effect “with respect to foreign nationals who lack any bona fide relationship with a person or entity in the United States”. But the justices “leave the injunctions entered by the lower courts in place” for individuals who can claim a direct connection with people or organisations in America. The upshot? Foreign students admitted to the University of Hawaii and a plaintiff’s mother-in-law living in Syria may not be blocked from entering the country. Nor may the Iranian wife of a plaintiff in Trump v IRAP. And anyone else “similarly situated”—that is, who has relatives or business to do in America—may not be stopped at the border.

Get our daily newsletter Upgrade your inbox and get our Daily Dispatch and Editor's Picks.

For everybody else, though, Mr Trump’s travel ban may take effect. People living in Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria and Yemen who have no “bona fide” link to America should not plan on traveling there for the next three months. Why? “[A]n unadmitted and nonresident alien...ha[s] no constitutional right of entry to this country”, the justices wrote, and “whatever burdens may result from enforcement” of the entry ban ”against a foreign national who lacks any connection to this country, they are, at a minimum, a good deal less concrete than the hardships identified by the courts below”. People with a reprieve from the ban include “a worker who accepted an offer of employment from an American company or a lecturer invited to address an American audience”, but not someone who “enters into a relationship simply to avoid” the restrictions—such as foreigners who rush to get themselves added to a client list of an American nonprofit organisation like IRAP.

Justice Clarence Thomas, joined by Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch, wrote separately to say they would have revived Mr Trump’s travel ban in full. The “compromise will burden executive officials with the task of deciding—on peril of contempt— whether individuals from the six affected nations who wish to enter the United States have a sufficient connection to a person or entity in this country”, they wrote, and will invite “a flood of litigation”. And, Justice Thomas added, the very judges that blocked Mr Trump’s travel ban would probably be the ones considering whether a potential traveler has a “bona fide” reason for being excused from it.

There are two key takeaways here. First, the court said, 6-3, that the freeze on Mr Trump’s travel ban should not be lifted entirely. This means that a solid majority of the justices—the four liberals plus the chief justice and Anthony Kennedy—believe there is at least a decent case to be made that the executive order is illegal when applied to foreign nationals with some tie to people or organisations in America. We don’t know the legal grounds on which these six justices find the travel ban potentially flawed—it could be the First Amendment’s ban on religious discrimination (as the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals held), limits to a president’s power to control immigration under the Immigration and Naturalisation Act (as the Ninth Circuit held), or something else. But if there was no plausible legal basis for lifting the ban on these individuals, the court would have given Mr Trump a freer hand to stop them.

Second, the timetable suggested by the Supreme Court means that the October hearing may never happen. Here’s why. If the travel ban goes into (partial) effect in three days, as specified by Mr Trump’s clarification on June 14th, it will run its course in 90 days, expiring on September 27th, 2017. That’s five days before the justices take their seats for their next term. There is no need to judge the legality or constitutionality of a ban that has expired. Why did the justices fail to note this oddity? Perhaps because it is not their job to implement the executive order, and they opted not to presume that Mr Trump will put it into effect when he said he would. But there’s another possibility: the administration gave them an opportunity to avoid addressing the ban more quickly, and they took it. Look at this parenthetical from today’s order: “(The Government has not requested that we expedite consideration of the merits to a greater extent.)” The implication is clear: we could have held a special hearing in July—an unusual but not unprecedented move—but nobody asked us to.

So, despite granting Mr Trump’s plea to hear his case and largely lifting the lower-court stays on the travel ban, Chief Justice John Roberts apparently worked out an ingenious compromise with his liberal brethren and the swing justice, Anthony Kennedy, that injects the Supreme Court only minimally into a big question on the scope of executive power in the Trump era. The chief justice has avoided making politically volatile judicial pronouncements on presidential immigration powers, anti-Muslim bias and the justiciability of tweets, and has positioned himself somewhere to the left of the court’s new conservative triumvirate.