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It’s O.K. to subvert democracy, so long as you don’t tell blatant lies while doing so.

That was the combined message of yesterday’s two big Supreme Court rulings, on gerrymandering and the 2020 census.

First, the census case: I was glad that the court temporarily blocked the Trump administration from adding a question about citizenship status to the upcoming census. In doing so, the justices rejected the laughable falsehoods that Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary, had told to justify the addition of the question.

At the same time, though, the justices effectively invited the administration to come up with a new rationale and try again. The administration surely won’t acknowledge the real reason it wants to add a citizenship question, which is to depress the Latino response rate , that way diminishing the political power of areas with many Latinos and increasing the power of overwhelmingly white areas, which lean Republican.