The basic principle of democracy, if nothing else, is that voters choose their own leaders. Once backed by the popular will, those leaders can then set policies and enact laws on the electorate’s behalf. Voters are fickle and their support can be fleeting, at least in theory, so the mandate to govern is periodically refreshed by regular elections.

That elementary idea is under siege today in the United States. Thanks to a surge in partisan gerrymandering over the past decade, American politicians increasingly choose their own voters, not the other way around. The result is ideologically entrenched legislatures that may no longer represent the will of the electorate as a whole, even though their members may accurately reflect their individual districts and constituencies.

Fortunately, the Supreme Court is weighing three cases on political gerrymandering this term that may provide a solution. On Wednesday, the justices will hear oral arguments in Benisek v. Lamone, where they’ll consider a First Amendment challenge to how Maryland Democrats redrew the state’s sixth congressional district in 2011. Slated for consideration next month is Abbott v. Perez, the latest chapter in a long-running battle between Texas Republicans and Hispanic voters over racial and partisan gerrymandering after the 2010 census. And at the center of the storm is Gill v. Whitford. The pending case centers on a map drawn by Wisconsin Republicans after they took control of the state legislature and governor’s mansion in the 2010 midterm elections. Using data from the 2010 census, GOP lawmakers used sophisticated computer programs to aggressively carve up the state’s legislative map into as many Republican-friendly districts as possible.

In some ways, Gill picks up right where the Supreme Court left off 14 years ago in Vieth v. Jubelirer. In that case, the justices weighed a challenge to Pennsylvania’s Republican-drawn congressional districts after the 2000 census. What resulted was a fractured decision that left no clear consensus on how to wrestle with partisan gerrymandering. Four conservative justices, led by Justice Antonin Scalia, concluded that the question was beyond the judiciary’s constitutional role and best left to the political branches. The court’s four liberal justices disagreed but failed to rally around a workable standard to determine which gerrymanders went too far and which ones did not.

As usual, Justice Anthony Kennedy sat at the center of it all. He sided with the conservatives on the immediate matter at hand and let the Pennsylvania map stand. But Kennedy also refused to foreclose judicial scrutiny of the issue altogether. “In my view, however, the arguments are not so compelling that they require us now to bar all future claims of injury from a partisan gerrymander,” he wrote. “That no such standard has emerged in this case should not be taken to prove that none will emerge in the future.”