A federal judge has ruled against the Trump administration’s addition of a citizenship question to the 2020 Census. In the first major ruling on the controversial question, U.S. District Judge Furman of New York’s Southern District court ordered the administration to stop its plans to add the question to the survey “without curing the legal defects” identified in his opinion.

Plaintiffs hailed the decision. “This ruling is a forceful rebuke of the Trump administration’s attempt to weaponize the census for an attack on immigrant communities,” said Dale Ho, director of the Voting Rights Project at the ACLU, which was a plaintiff in the case.

The Trump administration had tried several times to stop the case from going forward, including requests to the Supreme Court; the adminstration is likely to appeal Furman’s decision in the high court.

Actually the ruling was specifically that adding the question was Constitutional, but that there's a law saying you have to give Congress a heads-up, three years in advance. No problem with the question or Trump wanting to put it there, just a technicality about the procedure for doing so.

So the question won't be on this census, but maybe on the one after that.

This is not the first time that Trump has fucked himself by operating on the "Just do it and don't worry about the stupid rules" theory.