The justices of the Supreme Court know how to keep out of trouble. That’s the takeaway from the order the court issued on Monday, sending back to the lower court a new case about another baker who wouldn’t bake a wedding cake.

The case, Klein v. Oregon Bureau of Labor and Industries, was a near-exact replica of last year’s Masterpiece Cakeshop case. Like the owner of that Colorado bakery, the husband and wife owners of Sweetcakes by Melissa in Gresham, Ore., claimed that their religion prohibited them from designing and baking a cake to be used in celebrating a same-sex marriage. To do so, the owners explained in their petition to the Supreme Court, would amount to “complicity in sin.” In fact, they said, the very reason they baked wedding cakes was to “celebrate weddings between one man and one woman.”

Like Colorado, Oregon has a public accommodations law that bars business from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation. Acting on the complaint of a lesbian couple, the official in charge of enforcing that law imposed a $135,000 fine to be paid to the couple as “compensatory damages for emotional, mental and physical suffering.” The Oregon Court of Appeals upheld the order, and the Oregon Supreme Court refused to hear the appeal.

On Monday, instead of adding the case to their docket, the justices vacated the lower-court decision and told the Oregon Court of Appeals to reconsider the case “in light of” last June’s Masterpiece Cakeshop decision. Objectively, that disposition makes little sense. The Supreme Court didn’t actually decide the constitutional issues in Masterpiece Cakeshop. Rather, Justice Anthony Kennedy’s majority opinion found that two Colorado officials who had a hand in deciding the case against the baker had made comments that indicated an impermissible “hostility” to religion. As Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg observed in dissent, comments by “one or two members of one of the four decision-making entities” involved in passing judgment in the case did not amount to anything the Supreme Court had ever deemed close to impinging on the free exercise of religion. The decision was, in other words, a punt. It has no “light” to shed on the Oregon dispute.

To add a case to the Supreme Court’s docket takes only four votes. The Oregon bakers’ appeal described their case as an “ideal vehicle” that “squarely presents the constitutional questions that the court did not answer in Masterpiece Cakeshop.” Wasn’t that enough to interest four justices? Quite likely, it was, at least initially. That’s where serious strategizing must have come into play. The appeal reached the court last October. The justices took it up at their private conference 10 times. While the closed-door conference is the Supreme Court’s ultimate black box, we know enough about it to be certain that it’s not a place for idle chatter. No doubt memos were circulating, with arguments for and against taking the case. Having ducked this particular front in the culture wars a year ago, did the justices really want to get back in now?

I think that what finally prevailed was an institutional instinct for self-preservation. Why re-enter this battle at this moment? Cases granted this spring will be argued in the fall, to be decided next spring with the political season at its height and the court itself under a bright election-year spotlight. The court already has plenty to do next term, with three cases granted on whether federal law protects gay and transgender people against discrimination on the job. The conflict between private conscience and public duty is age-old. The court has time to resolve it in future cases. In fact, another such case will soon be on the way to the Supreme Court. This month, the Washington State Supreme Court reinstated a ruling against a flower shop owner who, because of her “relationship with Jesus Christ,” told a gay couple, longtime customers, that she could not design a flower arrangement for their wedding. The justices had vacated that ruling and sent the case back to the state court last summer for reconsideration in light of Masterpiece Cakeshop. The state court, deeming Masterpiece Cakeshop irrelevant, reissued its original opinion almost word for word.

What I discern as the Supreme Court’s instinct for self-preservation was also on display last month in an abortion case from Indiana. The state was appealing a ruling that invalidated its law banning abortions for reasons of the race, sex or disability of the fetus, a law enacted in deliberate and flagrant violation of existing abortion precedents. The state’s appeal, Box v. Planned Parenthood of Indiana and Kentucky, went to conference an astonishing 15 times over five months. Ultimately, the court denied the appeal, noting in an unsigned opinion that because the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit is the only court to have considered such a law, “we follow our ordinary practice of denying petitions insofar as they raise legal issues that have not been considered by additional Courts of Appeals.”

On a court deeply divided on the subject of abortion, that disposition was unanimous. Ordinarily, when the court turns down an appeal, it says nothing. That the justices chose to explain themselves in this instance has to be seen, it seems to me, as sending a message. If I read that message correctly, we can expect the same outcome when the states that are now busy banning abortion appeal to the Supreme Court from the lower-court rulings that will inevitably strike down the new laws. (But to be precise, my prediction holds only until Election Day 2020, when the justices will be free from whatever constraint they now feel about taking a step likely to incite a public backlash against the Republican Party.)

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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Linda Greenhouse, the winner of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize, writes on alternate Thursdays about the Supreme Court and the law. She reported on the Supreme Court for The Times from 1978 to 2008, and is the author of several books.

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