Census forms asking a citizenship question may not be printed yet, the Supreme Court decided Thursday, because new evidence about the Trump administration's rationale for the query must be considered first.
The ruling put into limbo one of the most politically consequential legal battles in recent years, and called into question whether the dispute would be settled in time for the regularly scheduled nationwide headcount in 2020. The Commerce Department has asked the justices to settle the case in time to roll the presses on millions of census forms next week, which now seems almost impossible. Other government officials, though, have said all the preparations could get done on time even if the citizenship question's fate continues to be hashed out in the courts until the end of September.
For advocates of a better-functioning democracy, the census case is enormously important for two reasons.
They fear that asking about citizenship could result in such a significant undercount, especially in Latino communities where people fear that honest answers would mean their deportation, that the partisan balance of power in Congress and several big states' legislatures could be contorted for a decade.
And they worry that permitting the executive branch broad leeway to ask whatever questions it wants, without a rock-ribbed rationale, tips the balance too far in the president's favor.
The court says the administration's explanation for wanting to add the question was "more of a distraction" than an explanation.
The opinion by Chief Justice John Roberts, who joined the four liberals in deciding to kick the case back to the lower courts, included a serious note of skepticism about the administration's motive.
"We cannot ignore the disconnect between the decision made and the explanation given," Roberts wrote, referencing Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross' stated objective of getting better data to enforce the Voting Rights Act. "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."
It had appeared, from the oral arguments, that the court's five-member conservative bloc was ready to allow the question – until the files of a deceased Republican strategist, Thomas Hofeller, emerged last month. They laid bare details about the genesis of the question, suggesting the motive was in fact to produce an undercount that would benefit Republicans in the nationwide round of mapmaking that happens with the results of every census.
Judges in three federal lawsuits opposing the question have said the Voting Rights Act rationale doesn't stand up to serious scrutiny and was designed to conceal a different and more partisan motive.
The Trump administration not only wants an undercount to tip more districts Republican, the plaintiffs in the several lawsuits say, but also wants to count noncitizens so that they can someday be excluded from the population counts used for drawing political maps.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.