Overall, this ruling was about the best outcome that Republicans could have hoped for given the flagrantly unconstitutional abuse of race with regard to the 35th District—that is, at least for the 2018 cycle, since there’s one major catch for future elections that we’ll get to below.

Republican legislators will most likely call a special session ahead of the court’s Friday deadline, lest the court redraw the map itself following its upcoming Sept. 5 hearing. One plausible remedy would place a largely Latino chunk of Nueces County in one of the South Texas Latino-majority seats such as the 15th or 34th, both of which are already held by Democrats. Mapmakers could then shift the Latino-majority 28th (another Democratic district) away from San Antonio, allowing the 35th to drop its portion of Austin and contract to become a San Antonio-dominated district capable of electing a Latino candidate.

Democrat Lloyd Doggett would thus likely get a new seat in Austin at the expense of a GOP congressman (either Michael McCaul in the 10th or Roger Williams in the 25th), while Republicans would pack Doggett’s seat with as many Democrats as possible to protect whichever of these two Republicans whose seat doesn’t get eliminated. Democrats would consequently gain a new Latino representative in the redrawn 35th District. Since Republicans will have to rearrange the lines in the San Antonio area, it’s possible they’ll wind up altering the 23rd District as well, but as noted above, they will not have to increase the proportion of Democratic-leaning Latino voters there as plaintiffs had hoped.

Consequently, Texas will remain one of the most gerrymandered states in the country. As Daily Kos Elections has previously illustrated, a fully nonpartisan map could produce up to five additional Democratic representatives compared to the existing gerrymander, with three of those members likely being Latino. An entirely nonpartisan overhaul of Texas’ congressional lines was never in the cards, but this hypothetical map shows just how egregiously Texas Republicans have sought to squelch the voting rights of Latinos.

These court-ordered changes will instead likely result in just a single additional seat for Democrats and Latinos, which is far short of the “Armageddon scenario” that some Republican legislators had feared. And while the court will have final approval over the new map, Republicans will likely argue that whatever new districts they come up with are based entirely on partisan (rather than racial) considerations), an argument that the Supreme Court has so far allowed.

However, there is a major landmine lurking in this ruling. The court did not merely find that the GOP’s map discriminated against black and Latino voters—it held that the Republican lawmakers intentionally discriminated. This is a very important distinction, because this is now the fourth court ruling this year alone striking down one of the Texas GOP’s voting laws for intentional discrimination. Tuesday’s decision follows rulings striking down voter ID laws, the state’s 2011 legislative districts, and Texas’ congressional districts that were drawn in 2011 (which, confusingly, never went into effect, as we explained here, but were nevertheless invalidated).

These repeated findings of discriminatory intent set the stage for a marquee battle over whether to utilize a provision of the Voting Rights Act that would place the entire state of Texas back under the “preclearance” regime of the Voting Rights Act. Under this provision of the VRA, all jurisdictions in the state Texas would have to clear any changes to voting procedures—from issues as seemingly small as the location of voting centers to matters as big as redistricting—with the Justice Department before they could take effect.

Several predominantly Southern states with a history of racial discrimination had to preclear all such changes pursuant to the VRA until the Supreme Court gutted a critical provision of the law in a landmark 2013 ruling. In a decision that feels especially painful after Charlottesville, Chief Justice John Roberts notoriously opined that racial discrimination was largely a thing of the past. Republicans in states like Texas immediately proved him wrong by passing discriminatory voting changes as soon as they no longer had to seek preclearance.

But thanks to another provision of the VRA, there’s a way to restore preclearance if a jurisdiction is found to engage in intentional discrimination. In this case, the jurisdiction in question is all of Texas, which could be placed under Justice Department supervision for up to 10 years—though of course, that would require yet another court battle. And while Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who infamously prosecuted civil rights advocates for voter fraud, will certainly allow Texas Republicans to pass their preferred voting laws, a future Democratic attorney general could deny preclearance and block these changes.

The prospect of a Democratic Justice Department thwarting Texas Republicans from passing these laws could have critical implications for the next round of redistricting following the 2020 census, since denying preclearance is dramatically quicker than waiting for lawsuits to work their way through the judicial system. Indeed, as we explained in our background article, this current case has been ongoing for six years, with Republicans enjoying the benefits of their illegal gerrymander for three of this decade’s five election cycles.

While Tuesday’s ruling is a modest victory for Democrats and Latino voting rights, it’s also another reminder that in redistricting, justice delayed is justice denied.