These reflections on the court’s instinct for self-preservation lead me to a final question: What to do about the census case? As the world knows, the deeply contested question of the validity of the Trump administration’s plan to ask about citizenship has become even more fraught with revelations from the computer files of a recently deceased Republican redistricting specialist, Thomas Hofeller. The documents appear to validate the conclusion reached by Federal District Judge Jesse Furman, whose ruling against the Trump administration is before the justices, that the administration’s purported good-government reason for adding the citizenship question was a pretext. The real reason, the documents indicate, was to provide a statistical basis for entrenching Republican power by disregarding noncitizens in the population counts for future redistricting.

The court heard argument in the case in April, a month before the new information surfaced in an unrelated redistricting case. Judge Furman, responding to a request by one set of plaintiffs to reopen the census case for further discovery, said that with the case now before the Supreme Court, he lacked authority to do so. Those plaintiffs, represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, have now asked the justices for a “limited remand” that would send the case back to the District Court “to allow exploration of where the truth lies.”

Even if the justices were so inclined, the request presents obvious logistical difficulties, with the clock ticking toward the date when the census forms have to be in final shape for distribution. It was that deadline that led the court to grant the administration’s request to hear the appeal directly from the District Court without waiting for a decision from the Court of Appeals.

But there is another option, suggested by the plaintiffs in a final footnote to their latest brief: Just dismiss the appeal. The procedure is known as a DIG: “dismissed as improvidently granted.” The justices use it once or twice a term, usually when a case turns out, on further reflection, not to be what they thought it was when they granted it. In fact, the court used a DIG on April 23 to dismiss a securities case, Emulex Corp. v. Varjabedian, that had been argued a week earlier.

The court deployed a DIG on the last day of the term in June 2012 to dismiss a case, First American Financial Corp. v. Edwards, that had been argued a full five months earlier. That case presented a question with important implications for the separation of powers: whether Congress can enact a law that confers standing — the right to sue — on people who, while they can point to a legal violation, did not suffer a concrete injury traceable to the violation. Circumstantial evidence strongly suggests that after the case was argued on Nov. 28, 2011, the assignment to write the majority opinion went to Justice Clarence Thomas.

For reasons never revealed, Justice Thomas apparently failed to keep the four colleagues he needed on board with his analysis of the case, and a decision was never published. Did he overreach and scare the others away by trying to make too big a statement about the relationship between Congress and the judiciary? Did the court, tormented that term by the first Obamacare case, just throw up its hands? The fate of First American Financial is one of the little mysteries I’d like to see solved one of these years.

For the time being, it’s a reminder that the court knows how to get itself out of a tight spot when it needs to. A DIG requires no explanation. Its effect is to wipe the Supreme Court slate clean, as if the appeal had never even reached the court. A DIG here would leave Judge Furman’s opinion in place and would enable the professionals in the Census Bureau, who strongly objected to adding the citizenship question, free to go about their business counting us — all of us. If I’m right about these recent signals that the court knows how to save itself, now is the time.

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