Here’s a safe rule of thumb for news developments in the Trump era: it’s almost always worse than you think. But the Supreme Court’s decision on Monday in Gill v. Whitford, the case about partisan redistricting in Wisconsin, provides a modest exception to the rule. The Court’s unanimous resolution of the case, on procedural grounds, does not by any means solve the problem of gerrymandering, but it offers a measure of hope that the Justices could still attempt a solution in the near future. (The Court came to a similar unanimous ruling on Monday in a second case, from Maryland, Benisek v. Lamone.)

For almost a generation, the Justices—well, one Justice in particular—have been struggling with the question of gerrymandering. During that time, a rotating cast of four liberals has found the practice unconstitutional, and four others have said that it was permissible. Anthony Kennedy, long the Court’s swing vote, has temporized. He has warned of the evils of politicians drawing district lines to advance their partisan goals: in a concurring opinion in 2004, Kennedy noted, with disgust, how one politician, in describing how his colleagues drew lines, boasted, “We are in the business of rigging elections.” Yet, in each case, including the one decided on Monday, Kennedy had declined to prohibit the practice outright.

Chief Justice John Roberts wrote the opinion in Gill, and it was an obvious compromise in order to draw the votes of all nine Justices. Roberts dodged the substantive issue at the heart of the case by rejecting the plaintiffs’ claims on procedural grounds. In short, the plaintiffs in Wisconsin claimed that the gerrymander by the state legislature had harmed their interest “in their collective representation in the legislature,” and in influencing the legislature’s over-all “composition and policymaking.” Roberts said that the Constitution did not protect such vague, general rights; the plaintiffs had to assert a more specific legal injury in order to have their claim heard on the merits.

But Roberts also gave the plaintiffs a road map for how to rework their claims in such a way that the courts would hear them. He said that, even if plaintiffs could not demand statewide relief, they could ask for the district lines where they lived to be changed. If lawyers for the plaintiffs recruit enough individuals in enough districts, they could, effectively, seek statewide relief in the form of new lines. Those directions have the feel of procedural make-work—and that’s what the decision is, in part—but the fact remains that the anti-gerrymandering cause is still alive. (After the decision was handed down, Paul Smith, the lead lawyer for the plaintiffs in Gill, told me that his group, the Campaign Legal Center, would turn now to recruiting more plaintiffs in accord with the suggestions in Roberts’s opinion.)

Further Reading New Yorker writers on the 2018 midterm elections.

It will probably take another year or so for the reworked case to make its way back to the Supreme Court. There the issue will wind up more or less where it’s been for years—in the hands of Kennedy. That, of course, presupposes that Kennedy, who is now eighty-one, will still be on the Court by then. No one knows for sure whether he will be—there are constant rumors that he will retire—but the fact that he signed onto the delay in the resolution of this case may be a hint that he’s planning to stay around, at least for another year. Kennedy plainly relishes his place at the center of the Court, and he does appear reluctant to walk away from a position of such power.

In many respects, the most interesting opinion in the Gill case was the concurrence written by Justice Elena Kagan, who also took it upon herself to instruct the plaintiffs in greater detail about a variety of ways in which they could satisfy the Court’s concerns. True, Kagan’s opinion spoke only for herself and for the three other liberals who signed onto it (Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, and Sonia Sotomayor), but her guidance on the need to recruit plaintiffs in each legislative district could speed the return of the case to the Court—and, perhaps, help the plaintiffs win once they get there.

The delay in any real resolution of the gerrymandering issue, however, raises the already high stakes in the 2018 midterm elections. The governors and the legislators elected this fall will determine how the federal and state district lines will be set after the 2020 census, and those district lines might well be in place for the next decade. Democrats have suffered for years from the aftermath of the 2010 Republican landslides, and the Party hopes to return the favor this fall, but this decision deals the Democrats another setback. The Court keeps punting on a final resolution, but the election cannot be put off past November.