This article is part of the Opinion Today newsletter. You can sign up here to receive the newsletter each weekday.

#Census2020 The Trump administration’s decision to ask about citizenship on the 2020 census is a break from decades of bipartisan precedent. “By driving down response rates among immigrants,” Bloomberg View’s Michael Strain recently argued, “a citizenship question would probably cause those groups to be undercounted. This undercounting would help red states when it comes time to direct federal spending and apportion seats in the House.”

On Russia. Meanwhile, the administration ordered 60 Russian officials be expelled from the United States after Moscow allegedly poisoned a former Russian spy in Britain. But Trump’s rare rebuke may still end up helping Vladimir Putin more than it hurts him, argues The Washington Post’s Ishaan Tharoor. “The thickening atmosphere of distrust between Russia and the West boosts his image in the mind of Russian nationalists,” and helps shore up Putin’s political power, Tharoor writes.

Linda Brown died this week, 67 years after she was blocked from enrolling in a whites-only Kansas elementary school. Three years later, in 1954, her experience helped lead the Supreme Court to strike down “separate but equal” segregation in American schools.