(AP Photo/Mary Altaffer) New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman poses for a photo with members of District Council 37 after a news conference on April 3, 2018, in New York. Schneiderman announced a new lawsuit by seventeen states, the District of Columbia, and six cities against the Trump administration's plan to add a citizenship demand to the census questionnaire. democracy_rules.jpg T he Commerce Department’s decision to ask about citizenship on the census typifies the way the Trump administration does business: It’s hasty and sloppy, disregards expert opinion, is calculated to hurt Democrats and immigrants, misstates the facts, wastes taxpayer dollars, and may violate the Constitution. Opponents of the decision, which was announced at the eleventh hour with none of the years-long testing usually conducted for questions added to the census, are seeking redress both in the courts and on Capitol Hill. Recent lawsuits filed by the attorneys general of California and New York make...

Kristoffer Tripplaar/Sipa via AP Images The headquarters of the Internal Revenue Service in Washington democracy_rules.jpg T here are a lot of reasons why President Trump’s plan to let churches wade directly into partisan politics, which Congress may now approve as part of a must-pass spending bill, is a colossally bad idea. Reversing the so-called Johnson Amendment, which bars churches and other charities from direct campaigning, would drag churches into the profane world of electioneering. It would damage public trust in charities, which could dry up their contributions. It would blow a hole in the election laws , by ushering in “pop-up” churches that come and go with the political cycles, boosting undisclosed expenditures, and letting donors write off purely political contributions. But the best argument against politicizing charities, ironically enough, may come from conservatives themselves—in an unrelated Supreme Court challenge known as Janus v. American Federation of State,...