A great puzzle of the past couple of years' worth of political and constitutional debate has been that so many people, mostly progressives, have continued to insist on federal-court supervision of partisan gerrymandering long after it became clear that the ultimate arbiter would be a five-member Supreme Court majority of conservative, Republican-appointed justices.
Supposedly the same institution that brought us the judicial-electoral train wreck known as Bush v. Gore, which effectively threw the 2000 election to Republican George W. Bush on the basis of threadbare legal reasoning, could be trusted to manage congressional elections forever.
Thursday, in declaring nonjusticiable the question of how much partisan gerrymandering is too much, Chief Justice John Roberts and his fellow conservatives on the court have renounced a power to manipulate U.