In this column, Due Diligence, erstwhile attorney and GQ staff writer Jay Willis untangles the messy intersection of law, politics, and culture.

On Thursday morning, a sharply-divided Supreme Court declared that partisan gerrymandering—the practice in which state lawmakers craft legislative districts that preserve or expand their political majorities—is beyond the ability of federal courts to remediate or otherwise address. The result allows elected officials to draw lines that reflect not voters' actual preferences, but the preferences of those who possess line-drawing power. It is a disaster for voting rights activists, political minorities, and representative democracy.

The case, Rucho v. Common Cause, consolidated two lower court challenges to alleged partisan gerrymandering schemes: one perpetrated by Republicans in North Carolina, and the other by Democrats in Maryland. In both states, elected officials made no secret of their intent to gerrymander, and the results of their handiwork are troubling. In North Carolina, GOP congressional candidate earned just 53 percent of total vote but won 10 of 13 seats in 2016; two years later, they had 50 percent of the statewide vote share but won 9 of 12 races. (Thanks to a host of voter fraud allegations, the 13th remains undecided.) Meanwhile, Democrats have failed to clear two-thirds of the statewide vote yet captured 7 of 8 congressional seats in the previous four elections in Maryland.

The Supreme Court possesses tremendous power, as Chief Justice John Marshall famously put it 1803, to "say what the law is." But the justices sometimes decline to intervene in a case when they believe doing so would decide a "political question," rather than a legal one. If the justices cannot arrive at a concrete, analytical framework for resolving an issue, they instead leave it to lawmakers and voters. Rules that govern how the Senate conducts impeachment proceedings, for example, present "political questions," as do disputes between Congress and the president about U.S. foreign policy.

Gerrymandering, in theory, is not a political question. In 1962, the Court so found in Baker v. Carr when evaluating disproportionately-sized legislative districts in Tennessee. Carr paved the way for the modern requirement that districts be apportioned by population, in ways that afford approximately equal political power to each individual's vote. Racial gerrymandering, too, is firmly a legal question; in 2017, the Supreme Court affirmed a lower court decision that found that two North Carolina's districts unlawfully discriminated against African-American voters. (The legislature subsequently re-drew those lines.)

But the Supreme Court has been far more suspicious of partisan gerrymandering claims, which turn not on the number of people in a district but on the relative distribution of Democrats and Republicans within it. To date, it has never actually struck down a partisan gerrymander, and in Vieth v. Jubelirer, a 2004 challenge to the map in Pennsylvania, the Court's four conservative justices argued that the Court is altogether incapable of taking up this "political question." Justice Anthony Kennedy, who acted as a frequent swing vote between the conservative and liberal blocs, struck an awkward compromise: In a controlling plurality opinion, he agreed that the Court could not decide the Pennsylvania case, but refused to "foreclose all possibility of judicial relief" in partisan gerrymandering cases, if the Court could arrive at a coherent framework for doing so.

The Rucho opinion emphatically slams the door on the possibility of future Court intervention. Writing for the five-justice conservative majority, Chief Justice John Roberts acknowledges that "[e]xcessive partisanship in redistricting leads to results that reasonably seem unjust," and that partisan gerrymandering is "incompatible with democratic principles." But, he adds, the existence of these problems does not mean "that the solution lies with the federal judiciary." Roberts argues that even though partisan gerrymandering is a long-established practice—and a rational one for self-interested elected officials to adopt—that the Constitution's framers nonetheless entrusted apportionment to the political process. Without a clear "constitutional directive or legal standards to guide us," he says, regulating the composition of districts is not the Court's job.