WASHINGTON — For all his talk about judges not being political actors beholden to a president, Chief Justice John Roberts Jr. and his conservative colleagues on the Supreme Court may hand President Trump one of the biggest political victories of his administration: the addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 census.

It also happens to be a coup with profound implications for American democracy.

At issue in Department of Commerce v. New York, which the justices considered on Tuesday in an 80-minute hearing, is not the legality of inquiring on the census form about people’s citizenship status. As Justice Neil Gorsuch put it, “It’s not like anybody in the room is suggesting the question is improper to ask in some way, shape or form.”

Instead, the case is about administrative process. Did Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary, follow the proper procedures set out in federal law when he sought to include the question?

That shouldn’t be a difficult question to answer. Three judges so far — including one in New York, whose ruling is now under review at the Supreme Court — have said that Mr. Ross broke federal rules when he set out to include the citizenship question. Federal courts generally defer to government agencies and officials, unless those agencies do things that are determined to be arbitrary or capricious — as has been common in the Trump era.

That’s how judges have described Mr. Ross’s conduct. It should be straightforward for this Supreme Court, which has long professed skepticism toward the federal bureaucracy, to investigate the actions of a bureaucrat who has had a hard time following the law.

But those skeptical conservative justices were nowhere to be found on Tuesday. In a move that would presumably help Mr. Trump’s party, they seemed ready to side with the administration and disregard the many irregularities in how Mr. Ross sought to push the citizenship question — which the government stopped asking in the 1950s because of the projected undercount in communities with large immigrant populations. That’s the same concern that critics of the citizenship question have today: that immigrant-rich areas of the country could be underrepresented in the count and therefore miss out on critical funding and representation in Congress. An analysis by census officials found that nearly 6 percent of households with at least one noncitizen, or roughly 6.5 million people, would go uncounted with a citizenship question on the 2020 census.

During Tuesday’s arguments, the conservative majority showed little interest in the fact that Mr. Ross ignored the expertise of the United States Census Bureau, which had warned that the citizenship question would lead to significant undercounts because immigrants may be wary of participating. And it could lead to cost overruns, estimated in the tens of millions of dollars, because unresponsive households require more follow-up. “There’s no question that the bureau staff preferred not to have this question on the census,” Noel Francisco, the Justice Department’s top Supreme Court lawyer, conceded on Tuesday. But, he argued, Mr. Ross acted reasonably.

The conservative justices also seemed unbothered that Mr. Ross lobbied hard to get other federal agencies to provide a pretext for his plans — an effort “to obtain cover for a decision” that was already made, as one federal judge phrased it. Or as Justice Elena Kagan said on Tuesday, Mr. Ross was “shopping for a need” for the citizenship data. That “shopping” ultimately led Mr. Ross to the Justice Department’s civil rights division, which caved to his pressure and said the data was necessary to protect voting rights.

That, too, went against standard practice. “There have been lots of assistant attorneys general in the civil rights division that have never made a plea for this kind of data,” Justice Kagan noted.

Despite all this, Mr. Ross — who documents show has coordinated with anti-immigrant stalwarts close to the White House — seems likely to get his way. “The statute that Congress has passed gives huge discretion to the secretary [of commerce, on] how to fill out the form, what to put on the form,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh said on Tuesday.

That sounds a lot like what Chief Justice Roberts wrote last summer in his 5-to-4 majority upholding President Trump’s travel ban, despite it dripping with anti-Muslim sentiment. Federal law, Chief Justice Roberts wrote, “grants the president broad discretion to suspend the entry of aliens into the United States.”

So it may come to pass that, no matter how ugly the underlying evidence or how antithetical to an “actual enumeration” of everyone in the United States, the justices will once again let the administration have its way.

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