Have you ever wondered why Michigan politics are so maddeningly dysfunctional?

Why our state embraced a Democratic presidential candidate who pledged to expand health care coverage, then elected a Republican congressional majority dedicated to repealing that expansion?

Why we chose a Democratic governor who vowed to fix the damn roads, then decided -- in the very same election! -- to preserve a GOP legislative majority determined to thwart her plan?

Late this past week, a federal court panel (composed of life-tenured judges appointed by presidents from both major parties) advanced a simple explanation for this seemingly irrational electoral behavior:

In a unanimous ruling, the panel concluded that the Republican legislators and the Republican governor who drew Michigan's current political boundaries after the 2010 census had broken the law to give their party's legislative and congressional candidates an unfair advantage in every election since.

An illegal advantage.

More:Federal panel orders Michigan to redraw congressional, legislative maps for 2020

More:Michigan's political boundaries under fire: 14 things to know

As the U.S. District Court panel that struck down Michigan's current political boundaries sees it, Michigan voters have been victims not of their own fickleness, but of an electoral fraud perpetrated by one party's elected officials. So the same voters who elected Barack Obama and Gretchen Whitmer by large, statewide majorities saw their votes systematically diluted in congressional and legislative elections.

This is not so much a revelation, of course, as judicial confirmation of the suspicion that prompted voters to wrest the redistricting process from the Legislature's self-serving incumbents last November and hand it to a new citizen's commission that will be forbidden to draw boundaries favoring any political party.

By adopting Proposal 2, voters made sure that whichever party controls the state Legislature after the 2020 census won't be able to repeat the constitutional violations the U.S. District Court called out last week. The more urgent question is whether the U.S. Supreme Court is ready to put a end to those crimes now — or whether justices will give the Michigan's GOP's lawless mapmakers a chance to rig one more election before the new redistricting commission takes over in 2021.

A remedy that can't wait

In 2017, Michigan's League of Women Voters joined 11 Democratic voters from districts around the state in a lawsuit alleging that the new political boundaries Michigan adopted after the 2010 unconstitutionally diluted their votes. The suit charged that the GOP's legislative majority had deliberately packed most Democrats into a handful of legislative and congressional districts while distributing the rest too thinly to make the remaining districts politically competitive.

After reviewing hundreds of exhibits and thousands of pages of testimony establishing both the mapmakers' illicit intent and their success in neutralizing the impact of Democratic voters, U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Eric Clay, U.S. District Court Judge Denise Page Hood and U.S. District Judge Gordon Quist concluded that Republicans had rigged the last four consecutive elections for the U.S. House, the Michigan House and the Michigan Senate in favor of GOP candidates.

"Because we find that these constitutional violations will reoccur if future elections are held under [the redistricting plan GOP legislators enacted in 2011]," the judges decreed, state Legislators should be required to draw a new map — one that gives every Michigander's vote the same weight — in time for the 2020 election.

The violations of Democratic voters' constitutional rights were so severe, the court added, that state Senators elected last November under the rigged map, who wouldn't ordinarily be required to stand for re-election in 2022, should be required to reapply for their jobs in special elections in 2020, under a new legislative map that conforms with the law.

"While senators may be disappointed that their four-year terms will be reduced to two years," the court acidly observed, "the sentiment of the senators elected under an unconstitutional apportionment plan does not outweigh the constitutional rights of millions of Michiganders to elect their senators under constitutional maps."

The coming time-out

The Michigan judges have given the current Legislature until August 1 to submit new legislative and congressional maps. But under special rules designed to streamline the resolution of voting rights litigation, a promised Republican appeal will go directly to the U.S. Supreme Court, which is almost certain to stay the Michigan judges' order at least until it rules on two similar gerrymandering challenges it heard last month.

In Lamone v. Benisek, Republican voters in Maryland allege that Democratic legislators assured the defeat of a targeted GOP legislator by reconfiguring his district to neutralize the impact of Republican voters. In the second case, Rucho v. Common Cause, Republicans in North Carolina are appealing a ruling bu another U.S. District Court's ruling that the state's GOP legislators drew new districts to handicap Democratic candidates.

Justices have been coalescing for more than a decade around the conclusion that partisan gerrymanders are unconstitutional. But conservatives led by Chief Justice John Roberts have expressed skepticism that the high court can intervene without risking its own pretensions to partisan neutrality.

Justice Elena Kagan has advocated a more aggressive judicial response. Because , redistricting pits the interests of entrenched incumbents against the interests of voters, she argues, the high court's reluctance to strike down unconstitutional gerrymanders risks "leaving citizens without any political remedy for their constitutional harms."

Renewing a license to cheat

If Kagan persuades one or more of her conservative colleagues that the nation's highest court court can no longer tolerate flagrant abuses of the redistricting process, justices will likely uphold lower court decisions ordering North Carolina and Maryland to draw new political boundaries. Such a ruling would greatly increase the likelihood that some version of the Michigan judges' order will be enforced in time for the 2020 election.

But if Roberts' hands-off approach prevails, the aggressive remedy proposed by the Michigan court may never be implemented, and our next legislative and congressional elections would take place on the same tilted playing field.

Last month, during oral arguments in the consolidated cases from North Carolina and Maryland, the newest justice, Brett Kavanaugh, became the latest member of the court to wring his hands about the corrosive impact of schemes like the one exposed by Michigan's district court panel. "Extreme partisan gerrymandering is a real problem for our democracy," Kavanaugh conceded. "I'm not going to dispute that."

But in an aside gerrymandering opponents worry may signal Kavanaugh's sympathy for Roberts' aversion to judicial intervention, Kavanaugh expressed the hope that voters might relieve the court of its obligation to enforce their rights by establishing citizen-led redistricting commissions like the one that will oversee Michigan's next reapportionment.

What an irony it would be if the distrust Michigan voters expressed when they cut state legislators out of the redistricting process provides an excuse for Kavanaugh and his fellow justices to abdicate their responsibility yet again.

Brian Dickerson is the editorial page editor of the Free Press. Contact him at bdickerson@freepress.com.